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Wits University said yesterday that it was partnering edX, a non-profit provider of such online courses that was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. edX has more than 200 000 students in Africa who will now be able to access free courses offered by Wits without having to pay a cent.

this is a good innitiative by Wits, Its good to see African University keeping up with the world trends in education. Considering the cost of education in SA this will make life easier. However acess to broadband and internet is still a problem.

Within the framework of the OpenupEd Project which aims to empower key national universities to release courses with open licenses in MOOC format, UNESCO organized a High-Level Workshop within the 2014 Conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities in Hong Kong.

"WHAT IS THE UBC MOOC? This MOOC is a non-credit online course offered by the University of British Columbia through the open education platform EdX. This self-paced course is to be completed in the span of six weeks. No real-time events are scheduled. For the full experience, students are recommended to participate regularly in the online discussions." My comments: What a great way for you to continue your studies with MOOCs! This course will deal with various aspects of indigenous education, including the importance of traditional knowledge, and it uses the EdX platform as well so you should find the interface very familiar. If you're looking for ways to continue your education now that the main run of the MOOC has finished, this is a great way to get started. It's also run by the University of British Columbia, where I completed a blended course version of the Open Knowledge MOOC, so I can highly recommend it!

All German universities will be free of charge when term starts next week after fees were abandoned in Lower Saxony, the last of seven states to charge. "Tuition fees are socially unjust," said Dorothee Stapelfeldt, senator for science in Hamburg, which scrapped charges in 2012.

Could this also be 'open access'?

...to see the full text you need to subscribe ...ironically I hit pay wall again!

From classic model to IT model in University learning.

"11 academic publishers, including major players like Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press, would be raising the cost of short-term e-book loans effective June 1. In some cases the increase would be as much as 300 percent."

Welcome to the Institutional Repository of the University of Pretoria, an open access electronic archive collecting, preserving and distributing digital materials created by members of the University of Pretoria.

Michael Eisen is a researcher at UC Berkley and a co-founder of Public Library of Science. He discusses the news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science named Kent Anderson as its new Publisher, who is a critic of the open access movement. The most interesting thing for me was the mention in his blog post as well as in the comments section by another, that it is perhaps a trend for scholarly publications to produce open access journals. A peculiar motive, to perhaps "own" the open movement? It would be interesting to learn more about this trend, motivations behind it, and the implications on how that affects the OA movement.

And then a quick Google search found an announcement that Nature will be fully open access as of 20 October 2014... but still costs $5,200 USD to cover the article processing charges - perhaps Universities should (will) start to pay these costs instead of the high costs of subscriptions to scholarly journals as they continue to open up their access. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/open_access/index.html

Wow--these article publishing charges are ridiculous. I don't know if the scholars whose work gets published in these esteemed journals have budgets that would allow them to cover such fees, but I am sure that I wouldn't be able to get multiple articles covered by grants for my own work in the social sciences. And I'm 99% sure that the public universities I've worked for would not be ponying up that kind of money to cover my publication fees. This seems like yet another way to penalize scholars working in fields that don't get big grants or living in countries that don't have this kind of money to throw around. I prefer the UK's policy of requiring all nationally funded research to be published open access without any publication fees. That's the only way to even the playing field.

Argues that increasing corporate control is undermining the foundational values of higher education.

Here in Spain we have a similar evolution of higher education; private postgraduate private schools give masters that guarantee the access to top jobposts, but they are not focused on analysis, creativity and critical minds, but on pure business. What you need to be on your future job post is what you learn. Public institutions are still on air, but they are struggling with less and less public resources to survive. So I guess this is not only going on in USA.

Italy is going even worse...i'm an Adjunct Professor for maybe 1000 euro per year ... surviving by scholarships, call center mid term contracts, collaborations where i'm asked to pay for taxes the university should pay, all levels teaching.. I like "Some of the basic principles underlying effective pedagogy, such as small class size, individual attention and the importance of mentoring, are being sacrificed in order to increase head count, limit labor costs and create a one-size-fits-all educational experience." The problem is that universities are to make profits from fees (that's why they hire me instead of employing me) and offer any kind of courses, masters to increase their income! The problem is: how can we expect to increase the quality of learning as far as decisions are taking by political, business, organizational sides instead of scientific and educational ones?

"Journalists, as 2013 ended, were busy declaring the death of MOOCs, more formally known as massive open online courses. Silicon Valley startup Udacity, one of the first to offer the free Web-based college classes, had just announced its pivot to vocational training - a sure sign to some that this much-hyped revolution in higher education had failed. The collective sigh of relief from more traditional colleges and universities was audible."

"The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that's structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor's degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix."

This is a great resource if you are interested in how things like publication strategy, data management, dissimenation, Open Access, DOAJ list, etc. discussed and applied in the Netherlands at one of the top research universities. This is a blog. It has been written and maintained voluntarily by a bibliometrician, who has been working at Wageningen University Library over 7 years. Posts and themes are in English They are very well written and structured. At the bottom part of the Home page you can find Categories, Recent Comments, Keywords, and Archive - they are very well linked and make search and navigation easy. Another bonus is that every post/article supplied with international and local references, which gives this source depth.

Just released. This is the result of a survey about the usage of OER in higher education. It gives insightful views on how OER are perceived within universities. It becomes thus a good support for those trying to implement an institutional strategy for OER. Best regards Ricardo Twitter @ricbruno71

Information Research, is an open access, international, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, dedicated to making accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines. It is privately published and edited by Professor T.D. Wilson. It is hosted, and given technical support, by Lund University Libraries, Sweden and editorial support by the University of Borås, Sweden.

I really cannot recommend this resource highly enough. The brainchild and master's thesis of a lawyer-turned-information professional, SIPX is an incredible blend of copyright control centre, digital distribution hub, and online marketplace. With the impending downfall of Access Copyright and its rejection by most Canadian universities, schools have had to quickly learn about copyright and establish good practices and guidelines, but this product provides the safest legal protection while considerably upgrading the dissemination of course readings; it also makes strides that push against the dominance of the traditional textbook market. It has already been adopted by several major American universities, including Stanford (where it was developed; it seems all the greatest open knowledge stuff is coming out of there!) and Notre Dame. Did I mention that it even supports MOOCs? I just found out about this resource while doing a practicum placement for library school, and I can't believe that I'd never heard of it before. It's exactly the kind of integrated library and informational system that needs to happen in academic institutions, and while it's not explicitly modelled on open access, it relies on many of the same values that we've talked about throughout this course. Check it out!

The book that I share with you is a treasure, is so extraordinary that in it we can find information about universities with high academic prestige just like Stanford University. It covers topics of great interest and dynamism like, augmented reality, game-based learning and global knowledge among others.