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"Welcome to the first ever Open Education Week! Open Education Week is taking place from 5-10 March 2012 online and in locally hosted events around the world. The purpose of Open Education Week is to raise awareness of the open education movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources is free an open to anyone."

"In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development has created this catalog of open textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members. Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license. Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks."

" Openness - concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information - is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media."

One very useful tool for all educators is the Open Courseware Consortium search engine that allows users to search for Open Education Resources (OER) at the university level easily.

This first story looks at the development of the Open Educational Resources area. Lou McGill talked to Phil Barker and Lorna Campbell about how the OER field has evolved in the last ten years.

"This is evident in an invitation to discussion in the Guardian, Talk point: Why don't more academics use open educational resources? It is a reflection after a seminar on OER which demonstrated the richness of resources available today and then raised the issue why they are not being sufficiently exploited."

The European Union is set to throw the weight of its €80 billion (£64 billion) research funding programme behind open-access publishing, Times Higher Education has learned. An official at the European Commission, which is drafting proposals for the Horizon 2020 programme, said that for researchers receiving funding from its programme between 2014 and 2020, open-access publishing "will be the norm".

To follow an Open Practice ethos is to make available your work to the wider community. One element of this is to share your materials to the community, so that others may easily identify useful and relevant materials. In this collective way, a social filtering of materials can occur.

"MIT OpenCourseWare and textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge have teamed up to provide free, high-quality textbooks to learners accessing OCW's innovative OCW Scholar courses. This is among the first collaborations between an OpenCourseWare publisher and an open textbook publisher and highlights the growing opportunity for open education efforts to reinforce one another in creating rich learning experiences."

An online newspaper that collects together the week's news relating to teaching and learning - particularly for those interested in finding resources and inspirational stories about education. Read and subscribe free at:  http://paper.li/f-1328546324

The OpenScout project invites you to a series of four webinars showing you how you can take full advantage of Business and Management Open Educational Resources (OER). Do you also recognize a growing need to improve your Business and Management skills but are confronted with a lack of time or financial resources to keep up with the latest developments? Are you a student in Business and would like to learn with high-quality, up-to-date, yet free learning materials? Are you a teacher of Business and Management and would like to re-use or adapt existing learning materials of competent peers to enhance your learning offerings? Are you a Business and Management institution looking for new distribution channels for your open learning materials?

"Today Polish Council of Ministers adopted regulation concerning the implementation of „Digital School" program for computerization of Polish schools and raising ICT competences. Pilot of the project aimed for 380 schools in Poland will equip them with hardware (tablets, computers for students, additional equipment). Also digital and free (under Creative Commons Attribution or compatible) textbooks for grades 4-6 in primary schools (K4-K6) will be created (43 millions PLN is assigned for textbooks). This is the first major government project in Poland which creates Open Educational Resources especially textbooks."

The Utah State of Office of Education (USOE) today announced it will develop and support open textbooks in the key curriculum areas of secondary language arts, science, and mathematics. USOE will encourage districts and schools throughout the state to consider adopting these textbooks for use beginning this fall.

"Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase "free-range learning" to describe students' behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says."

The concept of open badges could also pose a challenge to existing educational institutions, given that they might no longer be the chief conduits for awarding qualifications. Will they fight against the concept of badges or make fundamental changes to become part of the lifelong learning ecosystem, recognising badges in the entry process and awarding badges for more than just the core skills set out by a course, e.g. awarding value badges and recognising badges awarded by peers?

"NTER - the National Training & Education Resource - is an easy-to-access, open source, web-based learning platform that enables learners, instructors, and organizations to be part of an entirely new education community - the next generation of learning. Update your existing knowledge or discover a new field of learning - Get started today!"

SCORE sent out a survey between 18 October and 6 December 2011 aimed to get a national perspective on institutional engagement in Open Educational Resources through their librarians.  It also sought to identify library staff engagement with OER, their understanding of licensing and OEP, and their experience in using and finding OER. 

When everything is in a state of flux, we need opportunities for ideas to collide, innovations to be shared, concepts to be rehashed and mashedup, and iterative improvements to occur. Education today - at all levels - faces the challenge of tremendous change and unstettledness. Rigid systems break in periods of flux.

 This publication is a weekly news update on what's happening in the ICT for education and development arena. Read and subscribe free at: http://paper.li/f-1325685118

"The success of these largely independent initiatives does, however, raise a question: should they continue to be pursued separately, allowing the individuals involved to get on with it, or is there a case for greater coordination as part of wider institutional strategy? The answer to this question lies partly in what the different initiatives have in common."