Group items tagged

Martin Weller posits the current context for academia in light of the financial and funding hardships. A second post looks at the impact on educational technology.

Site to support this JISC project on implementing eportfolios. The ePI study is exploring large-scale implementations of e-portfolio use in Higher and Further Education and professional organisations in the UK . It is JISC funded and led by the University of  Nottingham. The study seeks to:Identify a range of examples of wide scale e-portfolio implementations within HE/FE institutions and professional bodies that will inform practice/strategy;Gather a range of case studies to support the articulation of models of implementation;Develop an appropriate means of disseminating the outcomes that enables a potential user to understand the implementation issues and identify the cases that are most relevant to their own contexts.

"Universities are run for the benefit of the adult establishment, both politically and financially, not students."--hard-hitting analysis of the US College system by PIMCO hedge fund manager Bill Gross.

Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online1 and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear,2 however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within our lives are accelerating rather than slowing down. How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet3 and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common,4 and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear.5 What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6 Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed. In this article we look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. There has been a gradual increase in universities opening up the content that they provide to their learners. Drawing on the model of open-source software, where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed

"When one uses 'sustainability' in the context of open education, the word usually relates to whether or not an initiative has solid funding or a viable business model..."

"The project funds student partnerships in various disciplines to develop online learning resources using specialist software. This complements our partnership with Jisc on their Developing digital literacies project which aims to give students digital skills by encouraging HE curriculums to include digital elements."

"If you are a large for-profit education company-say, an LMS vendor or a textbook company-give $5,000 to the DS106 Kickstarter project. At that level of contribution, in addition to all the benefits of the lower levels, you'll get a mention as doing a really swell thing on the fabulous e-Literate weblog."  Instructure did this thing!

UK moving to an uncapped regime. This analysis suggests that huge pressure will descend on the lower echelons of HE. At what cost?

waikato gets a mention