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While I was already familiar with a number of OER websites, I was surprised to learn of a few that were new to me. I have shared the complete list below.

Just as the real computing revolution didn't happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won't happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment.

Pointing students to data buckets and conduits we've already made for them won't do. Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances. For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged.

To provide students the guidance they need to reach these goals, faculty and staff must be willing to lead by example — to demonstrate and discuss, as fellow learners, how they have created and connected their own personal cyberinfrastructures. Like the students, faculty and staff must awaken their own self-efficacy within the myriad creative possibilities that emerge from the new web.

ELMS stands for e-Learning Management System. ELMS is a completely open source project built on top of the Drupal Content Management System. Drupal is one of the largest open source communities in existence today and gives developers access to thousands of community contributed and supported modules and themes.

Only 10 percent of colleges have begun phasing out their physical computer labs, even though the vast majority of students now own laptops, according to the Campus Computing Project. A full two-thirds of respondents to last fall’s survey said they had decided not to phase out their labs. Yet all of the technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed agreed that virtual computing labs are bound to emerge to supplement physical computer labs across higher education, and some even suggested that the rooms where students currently tap away on campus-owned computers will eventually yield to the virtual kind.

Well before the term entered the popular lexicon via a recent Microsoft advertising campaign, “the cloud” was transforming how college students interact with their coursework.

In a virtual computing lab, students log in via a secured website and choose from a library of “images” — virtual desktops outfitted with different versions of various programs. The selected image then appears as a window on the student’s own computer desktop, at which point students can open a program and begin working. They can save or print their work just as though the program were running on their own hard drives.