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"Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for increasing equity and access to high-quality K-12 education. Many state education agencies now have offices devoted to identifying and using OERs and other digital resources in their states. To help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of OERs to the Common Core State Standards, and to determine aspects of quality of OERs, Achieve has developed eight rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community (download link for rubrics below). To allow users to apply these rubrics and evaluate the quality of instructional resources, Achieve partnered with OER Commons to develop an online evaluation tool. OER Commons, an online repository for open education resources, is now hosting the tool and its resulting evaluation data. Every resource available on OER Commons contains an "Evaluate Resource" button that will direct users to the evaluation tool. The coding for the tool is freely available online here. Resources rated on OER Commons will create a pool of metadata, and this metadata will be shared through the Learning Registry with other interested repositories."

"Achieve and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) today announced a new tool for users to rate the quality of open education resources (OER) for teaching and student learning. The tool will allow educators to rate the quality of these resources for teaching and student learning, align these resources to the Common Core State Standards, and evaluate the extent to which the individual resources align to specific standards."

"Achieve and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) today announced a new tool for users to rate the quality of open education resources (OER) for teaching and student learning. The tool will allow educators to rate the quality of these resources for teaching and student learning, align these resources to the Common Core State Standards, and evaluate the extent to which the individual resources align to specific standards."

"SUNY Empire State College President Alan R. Davis today announced the college has joined the Open Education Resource university as the first anchor partner in the United States. Further, the college has established a presence on the WikiEducator community website facilitated by the Open Education Resource Foundation. "By joining OERu as the first United States' anchor partner and participating in advancing open educational resources, Empire State College will expand its own reach far beyond our 35 locations around the state and extend the national and global reach for SUNY," said Davis. "Most importantly, we will join the global community of learners who contribute to and benefit from the expansion and dissemination of open educational resources.""

"Proponents of open education agree that "education can be improved by making educational assets visible and accessible and by harnessing the collective wisdom of a community of practice and reflection."1 Educators at all levels can take advantage of a diverse set of resource repositories for a wide range of disciplines. However, to maximize the utility of these resource collections, it is crucial to incorporate into their design specific strategies to support their sustainability by ensuring both short-term and long-term value. Furthermore, by purposefully integrating learning materials with teaching expertise, the value of open educational resources for teachers can be greatly enhanced. "

"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."

"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."

"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. "

" Open Doors Group is an informal association of several educational, non-profit, for-profit, and government institutions and some individuals. Its purpose is to prepare students for the future by promoting, producing, and distributing open educational resources supporting students and educators in adopting and using open educational resources expanding access to education for all learners researching and evaluating the impact of open educational resources"

" Project Start Date: 2006 A wide range of individuals and organizations are actively involved in the development of free-to-use open educational resources (OER). Because the field is so new, there have been few opportunities to share learnings and advances across projects and boundaries. Little is known, for example, about how projects are facilitating the adaptation of open content by diverse users, what structures they are instilling to support peer production, and how they are attempting to inspire community engagement. Our Role: ISKME has worked with six projects to help them build capacity to track, analyze and share key developments in open educational resources (OER), and in the practices and models that play a role in project sustainability. The aim was to enable projects to discover unknown or untapped potential, to facilitate decision making around which practices to change or maintain, and to learn how other OER projects have overcome similar challenges. In addition, it sought to advance the field at large by contributing new knowledge on which others can build. The participating OER projects include: * CurriculumNet (Uganda) * Curriki (United States) * Free High School Science Texts (South Africa) * Mission 2007 Training Commons (India) * Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (United States) * Teachers' Domain (United States) "

"Below are more than 20 articles, websites, projects or other resources discussing OERs or free learning resources:"

"Four pioneers from the Open Educational Resources community offered their insights into "The transformative potential of Open Educational Resources (OER)" at the SPARC-ACRL Forum, held during the 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Denver, CO."

"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."

"In the spring semester of 2011, the Provost's Office and the University Libraries launched the Open Education Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This initiative incentivizes the use of textbook alternatives through ten $1,000 grants to faculty. Using any combination of Open Educational Resources and proprietary Library resources, this initiative aims to bring about new ways of conceptualizing higher education tools, hopefully saving undergradute students hundreds of dollars each year. Below is a copy of the Open Education Initiative announcement and guidelines."

"MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) is a collection of teaching materials, including case studies, industry notes, and management simulations, that MIT Sloan provides as a free teaching resource open and available to the world. Similar to the course syllabi and materials found on MIT's OpenCourseWare site, these materials carry a creative commons license allowing them to be downloaded, copied, and distributed. "

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.

A new report 'The value of reuse of open educational resources' produced by the HEA and JISC, highlights the need to support learners and academic staff alike in the referencing and the reuse of online resources.

"This post will review existing literature on Open Educational Resources, introducing five critiques: 1.) An under-theorisation of 'openness', in which the concepts of positive and negative liberty will be used to suggest a neglect of coherent theorisation concerning the practice of self-directed learning. 2.) The simultaneous privileging and rejection of institutional authority, where OER literature will be shown to endorse the reputations of established institutions while claiming liberation from them. 3.) The diminishing of the role of pedagogy, in which OER will be aligned with an untheorised learner-centred model of education. 4.) Humanistic assumptions of unproblematic self-direction and autonomy, and 5.) an alignment with the needs of capital, in which a Foucauldian interpretation of subjectivity will offer alternative perspectives on the notions of power and emancipation in OER discourse. "

"The colleges in 15 states and one Canadian province that make up the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) will now be able to tap into the collection of open textbook resources compiled by the international group of institutions that make up the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW Consortium) and vice versa in a new partnership. "

"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"