Group items tagged

Of course I followed the roll out of MacArthur's Badges for Lifelong Learning competition quite closely. I have studied participatory approaches to assessment and motivation for many years. Thanks in part to Daniel Pink's widely read book Drive, many worried that badges would trivialize deep learning and leave learners with decreased intrinsic motivation to learn.

Whilst not directly relevant to the course it is interesting that openness in medicine can be beneficial

"An organization established by MIT and Harvard University that will develop an open-source technology platform to deliver online courses. EdX will support Harvard and MIT faculty in conducting research on teaching and learning on campus through tools that enrich classroom and laboratory experiences."

"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!"

"The fate of scholarly societies is one of the most contentious and even emotional in the open access landscape. Many researchers have strong emotional ties to their disciplinary societies and these societies often play a crucial role in supporting meetings, providing travel stipends to young researchers, awarding prizes, and representing the community. At the same time they face a peculiar bind. The money that supports these efforts often comes from journal subscriptions. "

"We've been following the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) movement for a couple years now because we and our clients are all engaged in online learning at some level, be it totally online, flipped or hybrid, or just lecture capture for on-demand replay." In this post on Mediasite, Erica St. Angel has collected an impressive list of MOOC resources.

"Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible because the journals' content is largely provided free by researchers, and the academics who peer-review their papers are usually unpaid volunteers. The journals are then sold to the very universities that provide the free content and labour. For publicly funded research, the result is that the academics and taxpayers who were responsible for its creation have to pay to read it. This is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers education and research."

""There were a number of simply wrong statements, and I would have liked the ability to clarify this in private first," Eysenbach says. One hazard of having such debates first in the public eye is that "if there is some critique of something, and you don't respond immediately even if you respond one or two days later, it's as good as no response [at all]," he says, "because by that time the damage to your reputation may already be done.""

"Youngsters, who might be expected to embrace new ways of doing things, must therefore publish in existing, reputable journals if they want recognition and promotion. And the definition of "reputable" changes slowly, since journals with the best reputation get the pick of new papers."

The smart funders will work with the pre-existing prejudice of researchers, probably granting copyright and IP rights to the researchers, but placing tighter constraints on the terms of forward licensing. That funders don't really need the publishers has been made clear by HHMI, Wellcome Trust, and the MPI. Publishing costs are a small proportion of their total expenditure. If necessary they have the resources and will to take that in house. The NIH has taken a similar route though technically implemented in a different way. Other funders will allow these experiments to run, but ultimately they will adopt the approaches that appear to work.

"By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book."

"Almost every so-called MOOC violates at least one letter in the acronym. Why are we using this word that doesn't describe the things we attach it to?"

"Today (February 9, 2012), Senators Cornyn (R-TX), Wyden (D-OR), and Hutchison (R-TX) and Representatives Doyle (D-PA), Yoder (R-KS), and Clay (D-MO) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act, a bill that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies. The Research Works Act, a piece of legislation introduced in December that would ban the government from providing the public access to publicly funded research"

Using the new OER logo is a way of creating a common identity for the global OER community of practitioners, projects and researchers. The design creates a common visual idea and allows for the name of the term 'OER' to be expressed in different languages. "

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