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Compiled by Rodney B. Murray, Ph.D. from a survey in December 2008. Products are updated continually, so please check with the vendors for the latest information. For more information and the corresponding podcast, see:
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http://www.RodsPulsePodcast.com
Google made a number of announcements in the past week that are of interest to educators: opening Google Wave to the public and extending Google Voice accounts to ...
The term open educational resources was first adopted at the 2002 UNESCO Forum
“the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes” (UNESCO, 2002, p. 24)
he notion of openness, for its part, has been given legal force and definition through the set of copyright licenses released by Creative Commons, also in 2002
A second general difference separating learning objects from their open educational counterparts is indicated by the absence of any explicit reference to the openness or the open and noncommercial character of the resource.
What is significant in each definition is precisely what is included and excluded: Each definition highlights (either directly or indirectly) modularity as a technological and design attribute for the object and its content, emphasizing the “self-contained,” “building block” or “object-oriented” nature of the technology.
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)
this project recently met its original ambitious goal of placing all of MIT’s course content online by 2007
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
the funding for the operations of many of the projects is either provided by a parent institution
by a governmental organization
or by a combination of these types of sources.
he many projects that have fallen inactive or been discontinued
the nature and the enormity of the sustainability challenge online educational resource collections face.
The clear sustainability lesson from both this listing of inactive projects and the earlier listing of active efforts is the importance of ongoing, operational institutional or consortial funding for educational resource collections and the difficulty of realizing alternative funding models. Online educational resource initiatives of this kind, one can conclude, need to be seen as processes or services rather than as products that persist of their own accord.
Only projects that are large-scale, well-funded, and able to benefit from a first-mover advantage (i.e., being one of the first of their kind) seem to have any chance of developing collections whose scope extends to all educational subjects
The issue of sustainability of OER projects, unsurprisingly, was one of the top concerns
awareness raising and promotion;
communities and networking of creators and users; and
capacity development, specifically as it relates to the development and pedagogical application of OERs.
The necessary preconditions for viability – awareness, capacity, community, cultural change – are identical with what would be the results of success.
a vicious circle of “chicken and egg.
the majority of the use of this material not only takes place outside of the USA, it also occurs outside in the context of reuse and adaptation by teachers or instructional designers.
it is educationally valuable without detracting from the educational value of the face-to-face activities on which the collected content is based.
This finding provides clear evidence of multiple areas of significant benefit accruing to MIT the institution from the open courseware project, and it provides a positive illustration of important possibilities for change.
“OCW use is centered on subjects for which MIT is recognized leader
32% of faculty say that putting materials online has improved their teaching
35 percent of freshmen who were aware of OCW prior to deciding to attend MIT indicate the site was a significant or very significant influence on their choice of school” (cited in Wiley, 2006, p. 6).
David Wiley presents a conclusion that may be of the utmost significance for OER: “The time will come when an OpenCourseWare or similar collection of open access educational materials will be as fully expected from every higher education institution as an informational website is now” (2006, p. 6).
Simply put, this is enlightened institutional self-interest.
student recruitment
the potential for improving teaching and for better supporting learning
a kind of viral marketing of the quality of teaching and learning in areas of strategic institutional interest
They need not risk financial and cultural capital on creating yet another collection or repository, but instead can invest it in the quality and accessibility of their course offerings.
Open CourseWare Consortium and its OCW finder
It only asks of its members a contribution of 12 courses to its growing collection of over 10,000 courses
The point, as Wiley explains, is that “this strategy of openness” holds out the promise of “catalyzing further innovations” (2006).
Siloed institutions and enterprise applications, lack of data interoperability, escalating total cost of ownership, and absence of industry standards contribute to inefficient processes, creating barriers to collaboration and innovation.
more open access to education for more students, regardless of their institution, the region they live in, or any other factor
To address these challenges, the education industry must offer
more open data and processes within and across institutions to improve quality and outcomes measurements
a more open culture of collaboration to foster reuse and sharing, to ultimately lower costs of operation and delivery within the industry
Many educational institutions are taking steps to embrace open education by creating more open, flexible processes and data access to improve quality and performance outcomes, while lowering cost.
If you want more than a simple bookmarking tool, Diigo is for you!
Compared with other bookmarking tools, Diigo enables you to do so much more. Period.
If you read a lot digitally, Diigo is for you!
Compared with other information management tools, Diigo is differentiated by its focus on e-reading.
Diigo is an excellent way for groups of people to collaboratively annotate a website online. All notes, annotations, and bookmarks go into a socially comment-able feed that allows users to co-construct knowledge.
I’ve always been an “argue by describing the benefits” kind of guy as opposed to an “argue on grounds of moral superiority” kind of guy (which is why I end up in the open camp more often than the free camp).
a free-to-access, online “digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials… organized as courses, and often includ[ing] course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content” that does not use an open license is not an OpenCourseWare.
MIT OCW, the website says, “Each course we publish requires an investment of $10,000 to $15,000 to compile course materials from faculty, ensure proper licensing for open sharing, and format materials for global distribution.”
25% of the per-course publication costs (not technology infrastructure or external outreach costs – I’m talking about costs directly related to publishing a course) derive specifically from the desire for the final publication to employ an open license.
what is the return on this investment? What benefit are users deriving from open licensing that they could not derive if MIT published these materials online with a default copyright statement?
Would users still receive this benefit if MIT OCW were posted online with a traditional, full copyright statement?