Group items tagged

A live doc trying to develop a strategy for OER implementation.

Useful account from an academic on the whys and why nots of open text books.

A project about OERs and the practices of using them. Looking especially at ensuring quality.

The Hong Kong OU now has an open learning space with a range of resources.

Project on Open Content Knowledge Exposition and Teaching

Special edition of journal on Open Educational Resources

OERs from the UK. Quite a range of things.

Open Education: Changing Educational Practices - ejournal.

"The Connexions Consortium is a group of organizations and individuals, including the world's foremost leaders in education, who work together to advance open source educational technology and open access educational content. Members join the Consortium to work and exchange ideas with other members"

A lot of Moodle courses that are open resources. You will need to create an account to access some.

Useful and simple diagram describing a workflow for developing and releasing content as an OER. Could be modified and used for deciding on the use of any content (OER or not).

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

Why promoting Open policies may be the best strategy for open adoption in NZ

Tony Bates on the Open Textbook summit.

Why Open Textbooks are an answer (at least)

Starter page for the Open Textbook project in BC Canada. Very useful stuff.