" 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) "

"This paper provides a summary and assessment of the current development of open textbooks and describes a possible direction for future development and funded support of open textbook projects. This paper provides answers to the following questions: Why do we need open textbooks? What are open textbooks (in their various forms)? How are open textbooks developed and distributed? And finally, when will open textbooks be produced? As these questions are addressed, other dimensions relevant to the Open Education Resource (OER) movement are also revealed and discussed."

"The project analyses and maps the scale and scope of initiatives regarding "open educational resources" (OER) in terms of their purpose, content, and funding. It looks into different sustainable cost/benefits models and intellectual property right issues linked to OER initiatives. Furthermore we address questions regarding incentives and barriers for universities and faculty staff to deliver their material to OER initiatives and how to improve access and usefulness for users of OER initiatives."

"Faced with the challenge of keeping up with the rapidly changing field of information systems (IS), author and teacher John Gallaugher opted to write an open source textbook with a new online company, Flat World Knowledge (FWK)."

"The Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP) was developed to support the use of textbooks that are freely available and accessible online, and that can be adapted by teachers and learners to meet their unique needs and contexts. This article presents the findings of a research study conducted by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management of Education (ISKME) on CCOTP. The study examined the adoption and use patterns of teachers and learners as end users of open textbooks, finding that important initial drivers of use included reduced cost, dependable quality and ease of use, and that teachers and learners use open textbooks in ways that reflect their existing teaching and learning practices. The study also showed the potential for new teaching and learning behaviours aligned to the use of open textbooks, including increased teacher collaboration on curriculum development and the interactivity of open materials as an enhancement of student learning. In addition, the study identified challenges for the sustainability of the open textbook model, including teacher technological efficacy and professional development that supports open textbook use."

" the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) conducted research on the adoption and use patterns of participating faculty and students as end users of open textbooks, and the ways that that open textbook use potentially supports teaching and learning. "

"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."

"The Open.Michigan team aims to design and implement an evaluation plan that illustrates the impact of the Open.Michigan initiative as it adds value to the University of Michigan's teaching and learning environment and broadens its global education mission. At this stage in this initiative, it is imperative we determine measurable outcomes for our work and efforts and establish accountability within the open educational movement. This evaluation plan is part of a larger strategic plan and assessment that will take place over the fall 2010 and winter 2011 terms."

"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 fall Stanford University took a step forward in the open-education movement by offering three free online courses, following in the footsteps of several other elite colleges like Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

"So now may well be the time to see how other industries have used information technologies and data-gathering techniques to improve the quality of their products while reducing costs. For them, real-time data from supply chain and production processes and interactions between fundamental research and production processes enable adaptive management. We believe that in higher education, data can be collected and current interactions between the learning sciences and instructional practice can be improved for more effective adaptive instruction."

"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 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:"