Group items tagged

"The Saylor Foundation When we first canvassed the open education space a few years ago as a recently-established, program-oriented foundation, we were impressed with the wealth of content available, but found that open resources were disaggregated, difficult to discover, and of ranging quality. In short, students and instructors would have a difficult time finding and using open-access and openly-licensed content. We decided that in order to make these materials useful to the most constituencies, we would organize open content in a structured, intuitive format modeled upon the traditional university course, and that we would hire accomplished instructors to design the courses and pair them with best-of-breed open content. "

"Abstract Open educational resources (OER) raise many similar issues for education to those that have surrounded Learning Objects (LO). However the greater use and availability of digital technologies and open licensing seems to be enabling OER to have wider acceptance into individual and institutional teaching practice. While the need for appropriate design in teaching and learning on the part of educators, which was the primary driver of developments in LO, remains, the very openness of OER is changing the relationships between educators, learners and content (resources) and is becoming a primary agent of change. Experience in OpenLearn, a major initiative to provide OER from The Open University, indicates that some of these changes can be planned for while others will emerge as releasing content openly imposes evolutionary pressures that accelerate change and work around barriers. Development can then be driven by learner expectations of the technology and needs for informal life-long learning that in turn impact on how content is being designed and openly presented. It is argued that this represents a shift from a teacher-centric, systematic model of change in teaching practices as embodied in earlier ideas about LO to a learner-centric, systemic model of change as embodied in OER."

"The Learning Registry addresses the problem of discoverability of education resources. There are countless repositories of fantastic educational content, from user-generated and curated sites to Open Education Resources to private sector publisher sites. Yet, with all this high-quality content available to teachers, it is still nearly impossible to find content to use with a particular lesson plan for a particular grade aligned to particular standards"

JISC: "Open Education, open academic practice, open scholarship and open content all need digital infrastructure to thrive. The emphasis in this Call is on making use of existing tools, services and standards, to meet clearly articulated use cases. Areas to bid to will include: A: Open content and academic profiles B: Enhancing platforms for open content C: Enhancing tools and services for open e-books D: Search log analysis E: SEO of common platforms and format types for OER F: Open Call, including:"

"The second thing that Khan has made more accessible is the value of openly licensed educational resources. All material on Khan Academy is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license, which ensures that these resources, and any subsequent improvements, will remain freely available. Because of the enormous generosity of Salman Khan, and the resources he has marshalled into this effort, the world now has an enormous body of good quality material that can be used to learn about a broad range of subjects. The body of material within Khan Academy can be used to replace large sections of traditional textbooks. The support of high-visibility donors has given these resources a credibility that other openly licensed materials, for whatever reason, have never enjoyed. Salman Khan's effort and vision in building a large body of openly licensed material has shifted the way people think about open content. Partnerships with SmartHistory, and the plans to include community-created material within Khan Academy, will widen the breadth of content within Khan Academy, while ensuring that this new material remains freely available, freely modifiable, and freely reusable in perpetuity. Potentially, Khan Academy will be accessible enough that people will realize that textbooks provided by the publishing industry are an unnecessary expense we can all live without."

The National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) is a growing library of high-quality online course content for students and faculty in higher education, high school and Advanced Placement*. This non-profit project, supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is an Open Educational Resource (OER) and facilitates collaboration among a community of content developers to serve students and teachers worldwide

"Instruction that was structured linearly, captured in books that were all-inclusive monoliths with a predetermined progression for a uniform, somewhat "creamy" consistency, is shifting to newer forms of instructional content that are more "chunky," beginning as a scattered landscape of digital pieces that are then assembled to support full courses" --> OER supports that shift

Interesting to compare with MOOCs, whose selling point is a continuous - er, creamy - experience.

"The Learning Registry is a new approach to capturing, sharing, and analyzing learning resource data to broaden the usefulness of digital content to benefit educators and learnerThe Learning Registry: Use, Share, Find, Amplify.s. Not a website or repository… not a search engine… and not a replacement for the excellent sources of online learning content that already exist… ...the Learning Registry is an open source technical system designed to facilitate the exchange of data behind the scenes, and an open community of resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers who are collaborating to broadly share resources, as well as information about how those resources are used by educators in diverse learning environments across the Web."

"This document discusses the need for educators to openly share their resources and make them freely available for others to use.3 The open educational resources movement continues to gain attention with an announcement from MIT who recently unveiled their MITx program, which will begin to grant certificates for students who complete a defined number of open courses through the institution.4 The Internet resources listed here comprise a sampling of content focused primarily at the college and university level. "

"The Open Access Textbooks Grant Project worked with others involved in open content to create a sustainable model for Florida and other states to discover, produce, and disseminate open textbooks. This three-year initiative was funded by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). The project built on efforts in Florida and across the U.S. to create a sustainable open textbook model and a collaborative community to further implementation of open textbooks. "

"The goal of runestone interactive is to provide the tools, content, and hosting for high quality, interactive computer science textbooks. Everything is available under an open source license. There are really two main branches of the Runestone interactive project: To provide tools for building interactive textbooks. Our ultimate vision is to become 'The LaTeX of interactive publishing.' To this end we have built a platform based on Sphinx, comprised of several extensions for building interactive books. To provide hosting for interactive textbooks. We have three books that we host on this site for free, without registration or login required. We can also host a custom book for your course. If you are an instructor and looking to host your own course here is what you get: You can choose which modules you want to include. Your students get login-based access to their book so they can save their work, turn in homework right from the book, and take notes in the scratch edtitor popups. You get access to the grading interface Runestone interactive is a project of Luther College. "

"April will mark the 10th anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare, the university's initiative to provide free and open access to its core academic content - the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and even a selection of video lectures from over MIT 2,000 courses. "

(HEA) invites institutions to submit funding proposals for projects to enhance digital infrastructure to support open content for education.

What are the Key Challenges for the OER Movement?   With the great support of Rob Farrow we were able to put together a first draft of 10 key challenges. Our aim is to come out, by this Friday (14 Oct) , with a final list of key challenges to add to the Evidence Hub (EH). These challenges will be used as "Higher Level Questions" that we present to the community and under which we would like to cluster the community generated challenges/issues. This means that every time a user will add a new challenge/issue to the EH he will have the option to say to what "key challenge" it is related to. Another objective of this exercise is also to offer some key "entry points" for new users to explore the Evidence Hub contents.

"A power shift is occurring in higher education, driven by two trends: (a) the increased freedom of learners to access, create, and re-create content; and (b) the opportunity for learners to interact with each other outside of a mediating agent. Information access and dialogue, previously under control of the educator, can now be readily fulfilled by learners. When the essential mandate of universities is buffeted by global, social/political, technological, and educational change pressures, questions about the future of universities become prominent. The integrated university faces numerous challenges, including a decoupling of research and teaching functions. Do we still need physical classrooms? Are courses effective when information is fluid across disciplines and subject to continual changes? What value does a university provide society when educational resources and processes are open and transparent?"

"The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education is an educational non-profit organization committed to improving access to education. MITE (pronounced "mighty") manages a range of projects from establishing systems for the development and distribution of open educational content to efficacy studies and other educational research. Two of MITE's cornerstone projects are the National Repository of Online Courses and the MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning."