Group items tagged

"The CSU's Affordable Learning Solutions Campaign is designed to enable faculty to choose and provide quality educational content that is more affordable for their students. CSU students typically pay over $800 per year for their books. By reducing their expenses, we believe we can provide better access to a quality CSU learning experience. We are launching this campaign in 2010 and will be continuously improving the services to CSU faculty and students each semester."

"Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg announced today that he will push for legislation to create an online open source library to reduce the cost of course materials for college students across the state. The Sacramento Democrat framed the proposed project as an effort to lower costs for students struggling to cope with higher fees and tuition rates at California's public colleges and universities."

" 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"

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

"Mission Statement Writing Commons aspires to be a community for writers, a creative learning space for students in courses that require college-level writing, a creative, interactive space for teachers to share resources and pedagogy. Our immediate mission is to: provide the equivalent of a free writing textbook--the sort of rhetoric and reader that typically costs anywhere from $75 to $100. invite our readers, particularly college faculty, to help us develop this text, so that it meets the needs of students in diverse writing courses. "

"OER is a very complicated issue. But it is one worth trying to solve. Lowering costs for students is fundamental to providing fair access to higher education for those who seek it. We need smart, sustainable business models for OER that don't simply shift costs from one place to another, or reduce the overall quality of the materials we offer students. We need the highest quality instructional material at the lowest possible price."

"Project Kaleidoscope is implementing a set of fully open general education courses across eight colleges serving predominantly at-risk students. The project will dramatically reduce textbook costs and allow collaborative improvement of course design to improve student success."

"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."

"The time is right for higher education to pursue "best for the world" strategies enabled by the strategic use of information technology to improve learning productivity by serving more students more effectively while simultaneously creating a privately and publicly affordable, stable financial model for learning-securing education's future as an affordable first priority imperative for students, families, donors, employers, and governments."

"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."

OPEN SUNY, among other things, calls for the expansion of open and online initiatives, networking students and faculty with peers around the world and for providing students with affordable, innovative and flexible education in a full range of instructional formats, both online and onsite.

We preserve the best of the old - books by leading experts, rigorously reviewed and developed to the highest standards. Then we flip it all on its head. Our books are free online. We offer convenient, low-cost choices for students - softcovers for under $30, audio books and chapters, self-print options, and more. Our books are open for instructors to modify and make their own (for their own course - not for anybody else's). Our books are the hub of a social learning network where students learn from the book and each other.

"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. "

"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. "

"Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses-and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them."

"Successful completion of the course on Human-Computer Interaction by Coursera ( https://www.coursera.org/course/hci ) will be granted the same credit that they would get attending the departmen't own HCI course. The students enrolling for the course must contact Giulio Jacucci directly at the same time they enter to the course."

Whoa! Big step.

"Wissner-Gross demonstrated their "Hands-On Calculus" book, set to roll out in a couple of weeks. Containing far less text than the average textbook-he estimated it would only be around 50 pages if printed-it primarily uses interactive activities, such as asking students to find a function that is its own derivative by finger-drawing functions and watching the derivatives change in real-time."

Lots of etextbook action from Harvard.

"Dear SUNY Faculty, We would like you to consider being one of the first to produce an Open SUNY Textbook. We invite you to apply by submitting a brief proposal by December 17th to publish your textbook as an open educational resource and print-on-demand title, made possible thanks to a SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grant and the support of SUNY Libraries & SUNY Press. If selected, you will receive an award of $3,000 upon the completion of all work and required forms. An additional $1,000 will be paid to you if you decide to include and assess student involvement in the design and development of the textbook.* Although an open textbook is free online, you will be eligible to earn royalties on sales of the print-on-demand edition, if applicable."

"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."