OERandtheLiberalArts

2010. Nice to see them coming along.

" The nature of openness in education has transformed from just relating to open access to encompass a wide range of interpretations. This paper explores the concept of an 'open scholar' whose practice is shaped by digital and networked technologies. It is argued that openness represents an effective working method in this environment, and that creativity plays a key role in realising this. The relationship between creativity and open educational resources is outlined to demonstrate that there is a positive feedback loop between the two processes. "

"OAPEN is pleased to announce a new service for Open Access monographs: the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). DOAB will provide a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher's website or repository."

Cable Green's blog on OER

"We are delighted to launch our new Evaluation Tookit which aims to benefit UKOER projects by providing a structured way to collate their findings and observations and can also be used in the reporting process. "

"Tufts University is committed to active citizenship, trans-institutional collaboration, and internationalism, and is proud to share its scholarly work by providing free open access to high quality resources from all its schools, including research centers and hospitals."

"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 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"

"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."

". Gary Lopez, Executive Director at the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), and his team think there's a promising middle ground between crowd-sourced Wikipedia-like free instructional resources and traditional publisher-centric product development and distribution. They've just finished developing an interesting example of this new-age product, an Algebra I package offered on a part free, part paid business model that they see as the future of educational publishing"

"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. "

"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. "

MIT and digital 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."

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.

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.

: 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.

" Community colleges are finally getting more than praise from the Obama Administration, with the announcement Monday of $500 million for job training grants from the Department of Labor. The grants, which range from $24 million to $2.5 million, will go to 49 community colleges, some of which are sharing the money for projects across consortiums."

"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. "