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"It's the new business models for providing learning opportunities that concerned me in a previous post: Why Open Education is Dangerous. Are the ideals of open Education a trojan horse for commercial interests to undermine publicly funded institutions? What is driving the interest, is it on the inside or the outside of "Education"? Am I a reactionary for wanting to preserve some of the strengths of a public Education system? In other words, I see there are opportunities, but what are the threats? Is Education on the edge of the abyss, or the edge of a reformation? If the castle of "Education as we know it" is under seige, is "openness" in Education the dragon or the knight in shining armour?"

"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. "

" 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"

"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."

NIXTY combines powerful technology with open education to meet the audacious goal of empowering education for everyone! NIXTY provides an educational platform that students, educators, and institutions harness to meet their learning goals. Primary products include ePortfolios, Courses, WikiCourses, and Continuing education Courses.

"Open education is not just education with open materials or open-source software. Properly conceived, open education is an education that empowers our students to be active citizens in an increasingly open world. The presenters will review some of their institutions' efforts to combine open education methodologies with civic engagement and community-based learning."

"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."

"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.""

"Open Educational Resources (OER) offer higher Education governance leaders a cost-efficient method of improving the quality of teaching and learning while at the same time reducing costs imposed on students related to the purchase of expensive commercial textbooks and learning materials. Leading scholars around the world are already participating in the OER movement even without support from most higher Education institutions, including community colleges. Higher Education governance officials, particularly boards of trustees and senior academic governance leaders, have a tremendous opportunity to harness the advantages of OER for their institutions. "

"talk by Hal Plotkin, Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Education in the United States Department of Education. The title of his talk was "Meeting President Obama's 2020 College Graduation Goal - The Role of Open Educational Resources," but his focus was actually on how to foster a culture of sharing among academics, including the very important role that government policymaking has to play. "

"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"

" In this session our team of instructional designers and faculty will share our experiences and what we learned by utilizing an open education course (MOOC) and face-to-face study group sessions for professional development on open education. Incorporating a study group with the online open education course was found to be effective for keeping participants engaged and moving forward through the course topics."

"The "Open Educational Quality Initiative" is an international network to promote innovation and improved quality in Education and training through the use of open Educational resources. OPAL has been established through international organisations including UNESCO, ICDE and EFQUEL in order to establish a forum which works to build greater trust in using and promoting open Educational resources. "

"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."

President of Empire State College Alan Davis on their unique focus on open education: "One of the reasons why we have positioned and described ourselves as an "open university" is to grab prospective learners' and others' attention, and then be ready to describe what we mean by "open" education, and vice versa. There is a whole philosophy behind it, and it is reinforced in many ways by the impact of technology, with open source software and systems, open education resources, and so on. We are a leader in the state and in the country in exploring these areas too. But even without technology, our approach is truly open in all its dimensions, striving always to overcome the barriers of the "closed" traditional system that restrict so many from getting a university education."

The overall aim of OPAL is to support Open Educational Practice. This will lead to improvement of the effectiveness of teaching and learning by enhancing the quantity and quality of Open Educational Resources that can be incorporated into higher Education and further Education provision.

"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. "