OERandtheLiberalArts

: Community colleges that compete for federal money to serve students online will be obliged to make those materials-videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, and more-available to everyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license.

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.

"Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state's largest district are learning from an online curriculum developed by their teachers over the summer with free software distributed over the web."

"It's been 11 days since the launch of the Open Course Library and we had our 10,000th visitor today. The launch of these 42 courses was covered at least 67 times by reporters and bloggers, which will hopefully lead to increased faculty adoptions. The Student PIRGs has also written a cost analysis of the Open Course Library which shows that the textbook savings being realized this year alone is already more than the cost of the project itself. As of the first week the course materials we created have been adopted by faculty in New York, Oregon, Washington, and Romania. "

" It is possible, however, that affluent schools and students have a greater capacity to take up new innovations, even free ones, and so new tools and resources that appear in the ecology of education will widen rather than ameliorate digital divides. In this presentation, we will examine evidence for both the "tech as equalizer" and "tech as accelerator of digital divides" hypotheses, and we will examine technology innovations and interventions that specifically target learners with the most needs. "

 The OER Foundation, sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,is developing an open courses of study designed to extend post-secondary access to the bottom-of-the-pyramid worldwide.

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.

"This catalog provides information about some of the top examples of open textbooks, which are college texts offered online under a license that allows free digital access, low-cost print options and customization by instructors. "

Cable Green's blog on OER

Presentation by Matt Gold at MobilityShifts making the case for the commons in higher ed.

"The Open Course Library is a project to design and share 81 high enrollment, general education, and pre-college courses. These materials can be used for face-to-face, hybrid and online delivery. Our goals: Lower textbook costs for students Improve course completion rates Provide new resources for faculty"

"Welcome to FinalsClub.org, a 501(c)(3) non-profit open education project dedicated to helping college students collaborate, learn, and share their knowledge freely online. "

"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. "

"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.""

CMU's OLI