Group items tagged

Massive Online Open Course (MOOC): an online course or content aiming at large-scale interactive participation and open access. Open Educational Resources (OER): freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. ($): Requires some financial investment

OER can be looked upon as a process as well as a set of products. This is because educators need to rethink the way in which they create, use and distribute learning and teaching materials. Opening up learning and teaching materials does not equate to providing a free education. Open educational resources are components of a rich educational package which includes staff expertise, institutional facilities, tuition and feedback.

"Google Life Archive is a wonderful resource of historical images. It features millions of searchable photographs from the Life photo archive stretching from the 1750s to the present day. Most of these images were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of Google and Life magazine."

Some University of Delaware faculty members have begun "flipping the classroom," recording brief lectures or demonstrations for their students to view outside the classroom so that more class time can be spent on other activities. Faculty have found the Self Service Studio in 309 Gore Hall an easy-to-use resource for recording material to supplement their students' classroom experience: homework solutions, prerequisite material, lectures, demonstrations and other resources.

""The way do-it-yourself learning is depicted in her guide, it substitutes presentations, resources and materials from professors and books for presentations, resources and materials online through videos and online documents," he says. "There is no sense that it is do-it-yourself learning; it's just putting digital in place of traditional learning materials.""

NetSmartz Workshop is an interactive, educational program of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC) that provides age-appropriate resources to help teach children how to be safer on- and offline. The program is designed for children ages 5-17, parents and guardians, educators, and law enforcement. With resources such as videos, games, activity cards, and presentations, NetSmartz entertains while it educates.

"The Delaware Department of Education (DDE) recently joined a national movement to use high-quality, openly licensed educational resources in schools. In support of the #GoOpen campaign, launched by the United States Department of Education's Office of Education Technology, Delaware will build a statewide repository of open educational resources (OER). "

"The launch of SUNY OER Services should make high-quality educational resources more accessible and affordable to more students in the New York state higher education system."

"the company opened an "Amazon Education Wait List" earlier in the month. The new platform, "Amazon Inspire," would allow teachers to upload, manage, share, and discover resources in a similar fashion to the reviewing and purchasing systems already in existence through Amazon. Content will be searchable using assigned metadata tags organized by the federal Learning Registry, and will aid in an effort to collect data concerning how digital resources are created and used."

The UCT OpenContent directory is the web portal for accessing open teaching and learning content from the University of Cape Town (UCT). Produced by the Open Educational Resources project in the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT with the support of the Shuttleworth Foundation, the directory aims to showcase the teaching efforts of UCT academics and encourage the publication of open resources.

A new bill introduced in the U.S. Senate seeks to tackle the rising cost of textbooks by giving states an incentive to experiment with open educational resources. The Affordable College Textbook Act, introduced by U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Al Franken, Democrats of Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, would create a grant program that would fund the creation of new textbooks -- as long as they are made available for free online.

"Content curation is the process of shifting through the vast abundance of content on the Internet to select the best, most relevant resource, on a specific topic or theme,  so that we can organize, manage and collate the content for ourselves and share with others. Content curation is about working smarter and not harder.  Content curation is also a reflective process; as you curate resources you reflect on their value.  Reflection makes new information stick in your brain."

"The Internet, increasingly affordable computing, open licensing, open access journals and open educational resources provide the foundation for a world in which a quality education can be a basic human right. Yet before we break the "iron triangle" of access, cost and quality with new models, we need to develop sustainable open business models with open policies: public access to publicly funded resources."

As a follow-up to "Come see me at EDUCAUSE," I wanted to share out some resources from my presentations as well as some resources that I gathered at the conference.

"What this tool can do for you: Help you better understand how to determine the "fairness" of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code. Collect, organize & archive the information you might need to support a fair use evaluation. Provide you with a time-stamped, PDF document for your records [example], which could prove valuable, should you ever be asked by a copyright holder to provide your fair use evaluation and the data you used to support it. [why is this important?] Provide access to educational materials, external copyright resources, and contact information for copyright help at local & national levels."

"In a student-centric LMS, the core abstraction of the LMS is the student. In the diagram, I'm imagining a student with control of connections to other entities within the system. These could be instructors, or other students, or learning materials. To create a course, you invite students to connect with a common set of resources, one or more instructors, and the other students in the course. When the course is complete, the student can drop the connections she doesn't need any more - but keep the rest. As the educational experience proceeds, the student collects, under her control, the connections that remain meaningful and useful and drops the ones that are stale or irrelevant. Furthermore, these resources could be local and within the LMS, or they could be external to the LMS or to the student's current institution."

"Every dollar a student can save matters. That is why Virginia recently passed legislation (HB 454) to mandate that every public institution of higher education in the state create a framework to adopt and use open educational resources and low-cost resources across the state."

""The goal is to build awareness on campus, so students know that OER brings textbook costs down and increases accessibility," said Professor Ching-Jung Chen, Digital Scholarship Librarian, who, working closely with the Provost's office, is spearheading the initiative at CCNY. "We also want faculty to recognize that there are resources on campus and colleagues who have already adopted OER successfully.""

"these days when we say "textbook" we seldom mean textbook. We mean course materials. As the Vox article makes clear, the book is not always (not usually?) the hideously expensive part of the deal - the online access codes and other ancillary materials are. Certainly, there are amazingly expensive books out there that get assigned in classes (I hear law books are hundreds of dollars, I know some economics books are, some science books, etc. Even in Literature, a relatively inexpensive field, big anthologies can be pricey). But often - and maybe even usually - when we complain about the cost of books, we're complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books. The term "Open Educational Resources" recognizes this. It's a strange habit of language that has kept us from parallelism, though: What OERs oppose is not textbooks, but CERs, Closed Educational Resources."

"panOpen and Learnosity announced today that they have partnered to integrate the full suite of Learnosity's assessment and homework capabilities into panOpen's Open Educational Resources-based learning platform. The first of its kind, this partnership creates a resource that preserves the low cost and flexibility of open content while offering advanced digital tools that have previously been reserved for commercially copyrighted content."