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Since 2002, the Hewlett Foundation has worked with OER grantees to improve education globally by making high-quality academic materials openly available on the Internet. The Education Program continues to work toward establishing a self-sustaining and adaptive global OER ecosystem and demonstrating its potential to improve teaching and learning.

"We will offer two *brief* examples and then facilitate a discussion of the possibilities and challenges of leveraging open education platforms to more meaningfully evaluate student learning. First, we will hear from an ongoing study by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who are investigating learning as exhibited in classroom wikis. Project Manager Justin Reich will briefly share their approach to evaluating expert thinking, complex communication, and new media literacy skills within these very diverse learning environments. Second, we will hear from Vital Signs (www.vitalsignsme.org), an open education/ citizen science program of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Program Manager Sarah Kirn will share their progress in creating an evaluation approach to leverage the rich dataset of online student contributions (text, images, drawings, comments) to evaluate the development of higher order thinking skills in participants. "

"The State University of New York's Board of Trustees on Tuesday endorsed an ambitious vision for how SUNY might use prior-learning assessment, competency-based programs, and massive open online courses to help students finish their degrees in less time, for less money."

"Overall, the results of this study clearly show that the Open Course Library will not only save students millions on textbooks, but also generate a considerable return on the state's investment. Even in the unlikely case that the faculty who created the courses are the only ones who use them, the program will essentially pay for itself in textbook savings within the first year. "

"Now it is being reported that due to the great success of the program, Stanford plans to offer eight more computer science classes beginning in January, including Software as a Service, Computer Science 101, Machine Learning, Cryptography, Natural Language Processing, Human Computer Interaction, Design and Analysis of Algorithms I, and Probabilistic Graphic Models."

"For four years, students in John Sterman's [2] business management courses have gone toe to toe in simulated business arenas, with the latest being a concocted world of video game companies looking for an edge in marketing and selling their game consoles and software. The university announced Nov. 30 that the simulation, known as "Platform Wars," [3] would be freely available on the MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) website, following the lead of MIT's OpenCoursWare program [4], a seminal experiment in higher education's sharing of open source material."

The California Community Colleges Board of Governors established the Open Educational Resources Center for California as a statewide pilot program "to provide faculty and staff from community college districts around the state with the information, methods and instructional materials to establish open education resources centers" on their campuses.

The Open Yale Courses program, which broadcasts select Yale lectures online, will offer popular courses through a more traditional medium starting this spring: a book

"Open Education Program Director Institution: Tacoma Community College"

"The University of Maryland University College, a long-running distance education provider that has become a powerhouse in the online era, envisions a role for UMUC of validating MOOC learning through the university's prior-learning assessment arm. This could help the university funnel bright, motivated MOOC students into its online degree programs, says Marie Cini, the acting provost of UMUC."

"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. "

"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. "

article on new report from Ithaka S+R that extrapolates barriers to machine-guided learning based on barriers to online learning