OERandtheLiberalArts

"OER-101 is an open, self-paced online community course that has been built to demonstrate how to find, adapt, and develop OERs step-by-step. These OERs may then be licensed via Creative Commons, printed and bound, and integrated into any type of learning environment. The course is organized into five "pursuits," each of which represents one facet of the world of OERs. Participants are encouraged to complete all of the pursuits by following the suggested course progression, but each pursuit can also be completed individually."

"Locating, Creating, Licensing and Utilizing OERs (OER-101)"

"MOOCs are technically only "open" if they are free. So for Coursera, the pathway to credit or verifiable credentials will likely not be that of a pure MOOC"

"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. "

"LAWDI 2012 Things to read"

"We are are very pleased to announce that all Flat World Knowledge textbooks published under an open license are permanently and freely available from Saylor.org - free to read, free to download, free to share and remix under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license."

Nice!

"The Open Access Textbooks Grant Project worked with others involved in open content to create a sustainable model for Florida and other states to discover, produce, and disseminate open textbooks. This three-year initiative was funded by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). The project built on efforts in Florida and across the U.S. to create a sustainable open textbook model and a collaborative community to further implementation of open textbooks. "

Nice presentation of these.

"Our free, high-quality digital texts of Shakespeare's plays start with the basics: superb source texts, meticulously edited on the basis of current scholarship. The plays in Folger Digital Texts are taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library editions, completed in 2010 by editors Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine and published by Simon & Schuster. To these texts, we've added sophisticated coding that works behind the scenes to make the plays easy to read, search, and index-and lays the groundwork for new features in the future. We've also used the same page numbers and layouts as in the Folger print editions, so it's simple to use the two together. Our digital texts are also powerful scholarly tools in the fast-growing field of digital Shakespeare research. We encourage researchers and developers to download the coded texts at no cost for noncommercial purposes, including specialized studies and mobile apps."

The European Commission called for increased use of open education to be "scaled-up in all learning contexts".

"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.

I wonder if we'll see MOOCs evolving into freemium models, with the free stuff being open.

"This project seeks to expand the beta version of a Web-based platform for creating, editing, organizing, consuming, and sharing course materials. We envision building a corpus of open source materials available for dynamic use by the faculty and students at Harvard and beyond. Instead of locking down materials in formalized casebooks, we believe that course books can be "free" (as in free speech) for everyone to access and build upon."

Good to see.

"By being adaptable and accessible, OERs have the potential to solve the global education crisis and contribute to sustainable economic growth - if governments are prepared to act"

It would be fun to have those two authors debate with, say, the leaders of the RIAA.