Group items tagged

The Open University's peer reviewed Journal of Open and Distance Learning, Open Learning, has devoted its first issue of 2009 to the theme of Open Educational Resources (OER).The issue provides an introduction to the emerging OER movement and its implications for education systems and institutions, educators and learners. The articles describe a range of initiatives and issues, and articulate the vision of some of the most committed and passionate champions of Open Educational Resources. Together they communicate the energy and dynamism associated with this new movement, and its potential to extend learning opportunities worldwide.

Just received this in my inbox: "WASHINGTON DC (August 25th, 2009) - Curriki, the largest online community for creating and sharing open source K-12 curricula, was asked by the Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) to provide a continuity of learning plan for states, school districts, and individuals as part of a nationwide readiness initiative for a possible resurgence of the H1N1 virus. Curriki's continuity of learning plan includes access to a free and open repository of teaching and learning resources built on an open platform that can be customized for individual states or school districts. Like an iTunes playlist, users of Curriki can create collections of free and open educational resources, along with repositories of other supplemental content. If a teacher prefers one lesson to another, he or she can easily swap content in or out to meet the individual needs of the students. States or school districts can take advantage of customized landing pages designed to provide specific information, news, resources, and links to their education stakeholders. Additionally, Curriki's group function allow members of a district, school, or community to stay connected and privately share resources, communicate and post news and collaborate on projects from any location. " I think that perhaps online learning is about to completely boom largely as a result of the growing pandemic and the need for isolation and ongoing learning. Curriki has things together for this and I'm going to take a look at this for our school.

While most teachers will not understand what this means, an API is something that lets other websites interact with a main website. OpenEd has released an API to allow others to interact with their resources and find things based on standards or keywords. What this means is that OpenEd is going to be a very useful tool for all of education in the future because of this technological tool. It also means that if you're developing for a state or for an organization that provides educational resources, you should tap into this for a huge repository of almost a quarter of a million standards aligned resources that your teachers can search. This is great news.

As most of you are undoubtedly aware, next week, 5-10 March, is the First Annual Open Education Week - a time set aside each year to celebrate and raise awareness about open education and open educational resources (OER).

One of the best ways to do that is to experiment with the courses you'd be taking when you enroll in school. With these open education resources, you can take all the classes you want - not for credit, of course - without paying a dime.

With so many open courseware resources available, this list should help you narrow your search to find exactly what you want. From educational theories, science and math, special education, technology, podcasts, and more.

Open Courseware Resources

If you want to understand what FLOE does and how it can help you use free resources to help all learners, then you can watch this video. This is for everyone in special education and especially those developing curriculum for those in special education. The first year it is free and after that they do charge for the service, I believe.

Great TED-talk about open education and open access to research materials.

"As part of our efforts to support the amazing community of schools, teachers and educators globally, we are delighted to announce that our plans for a 2020 UKEdChat Conference have been moved forward to June 2020. The 2020 event will be our second online conference, and many educators got involved in the first event, sharing resources, pedagogy and great ideas that can be used in the classroom. We have now opened our 'Call to Speakers', and we invite school leaders, teachers, educational authors, educational consultants and educational companies to create (upto) 20-minute videos that will inspire delegates during the 3-day event."

Verena Roberts is organizing and open online community around research based gamification in education. We're using this as a resource for the Gamifi-ED project K12 and college students and for anyone who is teaching gamification in education as these resources will be open.

Here you will find FREE TO USE learning resources that you can use to supplement your own course materials or learning. Some of these are from BC-based projects while others are from Open Educational Resource projects from around the world.

"TESSA brings together teachers and teacher educators from across Africa. It offers a range of materials (Open Educational Resources) in four languages to support school based teacher education and training."

The expansion of secondary education is now the world's most pressing educational challenge. This carefully prepared and thoroughly researched book should inspire policy-makers and educational planners to explore how open schooling can expand secondary education cost-effectively in their jurisdictions.

You have until NOvember 26 to nominate for the Edublog awards. There are many who don't care for this awards system because there are many great bloggers, but I think anything that recognizes educational blogging is a good thing. So, nominate away, here is information. Here's the page that tells you how to do this. "The 2012 Edublog Awards are a go! The Edublog Awards is a community based initiative started in 2004 in response to community concerns relating to how schools, districts and educational institutions were blocking access of learner and teacher blog sites for educational purposes.  The purpose of the Edublog awards is promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media. Working together, we create an invaluable resource of the best-of-the-best on the web! How Does It Work? There are 3 parts to the awards: Nominations - NOW through November 26th Voting - TBA The Live Awards Ceremony - TBA"

Yale is joining the open bandwagon and now has some more open courses including courses on "The American Novel Since 1945" "introduction to Greek History, Civil War History, France history since 1871, Milton, physics and engineering. There are great college level resources becoming available. There are also many audio books and online podcasts here.

Great new open courseware from Yale.

Offers interactive demonstrations of anything that can be modeled mathematically - bacteria growth, light refraction, supply and demand, etc. Running a demo requires Mathematica Player, which can be downloaded free, along with the demos

About the Wolfram Demonstrations Project Conceived by Mathematica creator and scientist Stephen Wolfram as a way to bring computational exploration to the widest possible audience, the Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields. Its daily-growing collection of interactive illustrations is created by Mathematica users from around the world, who participate by contributing innovative Demonstrations. Interactive computational resources have typically been scattered across the web--requiring specialized programming knowledge that's made them difficult and expensive to develop. As a result, their coverage has long been limited, and progress has been slow. In many ways, the Wolfram Demonstrations Project introduces a new paradigm for exploring ideas. The power to easily create interactive visualizations, once in the domain of computing experts alone, is now in the hands of every Mathematica user. Demonstrations can be created with just a few short lines of readable code, powered by the revolutionary advances in Mathematica. This opens the door for researchers, educators, students, and professionals at any level to create their own sophisticated mini-applications and publish them online.

Open Culture has a list of more than 200 educational resources for teachers and students. Go through these! There are more than 200 audiobooks. So many things!

Stephen Downes pointed out this great resource that is planning to be the "alternative" to MOOCS. "Open Educational Resources University course will be able to pay a fee to have their work assessed for academic credit, which would then be recognised by all the universities participating in the OERu."

Companies fight for their future but we may be accepting a dependence we will regret according to this insightful article covering adaptive learning and open education resources s two opposite choices in the future of education.