Archive for November, 2009

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WikiEducator and Connexions Collaboration

November 17, 2009

Wayne Mackintosh, Director, International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand announces that the OER Foundation is “able to take OER interoperability and remix potential to new levels. Collaborating with OER projects which subscribe to licenses which meet the requirements of the free cultural works definition, WikiEducator (WE) aims to provide educators with greater freedom of choice to mix and match the best of two OER worlds, namely “producer-consumer” models with more traditional work flow approaches and commons-based peer production. This is an exciting project to build import export capability between the Connexions and WikiEducator/Mediawiki platforms. WE need your help in building better OER futures.”

He suggests the following ways for educators to get involved:

1. Please visit the project planning node to find out more about the project: http://wikieducator.org/CNX-WE

2. All Connexions authors, WikiEducator authors, editors of the Wikimedia Foundation Projects are invited to help us achieve success with this project.

3. WE will use the Connexions mailing list on Google Groups for our discussions — Join the list if you’re interested (http://groups.google.co.nz/group/connexions-community)

4. Visit the mini SWOT analysis page on WikiEducator and help us understand the context and remix needs of educators and OER authors (http://tinyurl.com/yakk4vm)

5. Consider joining the WE open planning team or list of active contributors (http://tinyurl.com/yed7erx)

Wikieducator
http://www.wikieducator.org

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OER Workflow Diagram

November 16, 2009

Lisa Rogers, Institute for Computer-based Learning at Heriot-Watt University, created a helpful OER Workflow Diagram that provides a guide for OER developers.   Steps covered include: 

Collate Resources

Select Resources

Third Party Content

Clear Third Party IPR

Find Replacements

Approve Release

Technical Work

Select License

Describe Resource

Quality Assurance 

Dissemination

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$5M Grant for New Developmental Math Series

November 16, 2009

The Gates Foundation awarded a $5M grant to the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE) to fund a new developmental math series as an Open Educational Resource.

New Developmental Math Series
Presented by: Ruth Rominger, Director of Learning Design
Thursday, Nov. 19, at 2pm EST

“Learn more about the new developmental math series that will be distributed through NROC. Generously funded by a grant from the Gates
Foundation, this project strives to dramatically increase the number of students that meet the required mathematics standards for
admittance to desirable post-secondary educational programs and career opportunities. The series will cover four courses required by most
remedial math sequences: Basic Math, Elementary Algebra, and Geometry/Intermediate Algebra integrated with Statistics topics.”

Join MITE for a FREE overview of the project plan. Seating is limited, so please email:  membership@montereyinstitute.org
TODAY to secure your place!
This webinar will be archived at the NROC Network for future reference.

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New Open Textbook Catalog

November 15, 2009

The Student PIRGs recently launched their new Open Textbook Catalog to help faculty find high quality open textbooks.

Open textbooks listed by subject:

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CC-OLI Seeks Participation

November 15, 2009

The Community College Opening Learning Initiative (CC-OLI) seeks faculty and colleges to participate in the first round of course development and adaptation (http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/initiative/research/158-community-college-oli). There are three levels of participation: Core Team, Review & Development and Use & Evaluation.  The first learning environment CC-OLI will adapt OLI introductory Statistics. The first new learning environment CC-OLI will develop will be Human Anatomy and Physiology.

If you are interested or want more information, please contact Candace Thille at Carnegie Mellon - cthille@cmu.edu

“Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with state agencies and national affinity groups, will establish a consortium of community colleges that will enact a large scale, systems-change process that increases efficiency in the way instruction is developed, delivered, evaluated, and continuously improved.

The overarching goal is to demonstrate a 25% higher rate of course completion for students from vulnerable populations, with a focus on gatekeeper courses critical to graduation success. Within three years, the Community College Opening Learning Initiative (CC-OLI) will scale to 40 community college partners and will reach an additional 50-100 classrooms.

CC-OLI will foster a collaborative, participatory process for developing, adapting, evaluating, and continuously improving learning environments. The project will move from the current approach of cottage-industry course development and delivery that leads to uneven learning and mass inefficiency to a consortium of institutions, departments, and faculty members working on consolidated solutions driven by solid evidence of effectiveness. The change process will build on the strengths of the existing community college culture and address directly historic barriers to change such as the tension between standards and local autonomy.”

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New Report: Harnessing Openness to Improve Higher Education

November 10, 2009

The Digital Connections Council of the Committee for Economic Development (CED) just posted this 100 page report - Harnessing Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher EducationSee pages 37 and 38 about open textbooks.  (Warning – this PDF is very large.)   One recommendation about textbooks is to “review the existing legal regime to determine what analog expectations about books should apply in the world of electronic texts to strike an appropriate balance between the rights of users and those of authors, publishers, and electronic book sellers.”

Read the summary of the report.

Read the press release.

CED is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of more than 200 business leaders and university presidents.

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Openness and the Future of Higher Education

November 7, 2009

A special issue of of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) on openness in education was just published. 

Articles include -

Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education by David Wiley, John Hilton III

From Open Content to Open Course Models: Increasing Access and Enabling Global Participation in Higher Education by Tannis Morgan, Stephen Carey

The Impact of Openness on Bridging Educational Digital Divides by Andy Lane

Open Textbook Proof-of-Concept via Connexions by Judy Baker, Joel Thierstein, Kathi Fletcher, Manpreet Kaur, Jonathan Emmons

Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education by Jan Philipp Schmidt, Christine Geith, Stian Håklev, Joel Thierstein

Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability by Norm Friesen

The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Course Tools by Antonio Fini

Incentives and Disincentives for the Use of OpenCourseWare by Anne M. Arendt, Brett E. Shelton

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What is a Super OER?

November 4, 2009

Find out how to overcome barriers to use of open educational resources with Super OERs from UNESCO’s 2009 Access to OER report.

The super-accessible OER –

  • is easily downloadable
  • can be used offline
  • is truly platform independent
  • can be used on all the available mobile devices
  • is relevant
  • can be easily modified
  • is incentivised
  • is fast
  • bandwidth aware
  • is easy to find
  • machine readable
  • can be cached and mirrored automatically
  • can be easily filed within local collections of resource
  • is easy to adapt
  • has clear licensing about how it can be used
  • is easy to use
  • is easy to learn from
  • is printable
  • can transform itself into appropriate formats
  • is easy to adapt
  • has clear licensing about how it can be used
  • can transform itself into appropriate formats
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Heed the Call: Open Education

November 3, 2009

Heed the Open Education Call to Action

Forty attendees at the Open EdTech Summit, co-sponsored by the New Media Consortium and the Open University of Catalunya, created 50 action items.  The top 5 action tasks are -

  1. We must encourage the reuse and remixing of rich media.
  2. We must embrace the full promise of mobile devices as learning platforms.
  3. We must award credentials based on learning outcomes. 
  4. We must enable a culture of sharing.
  5. We must take care that open resources include the context that will enable their use and understanding.
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Open Textbooks and the Revolution?

November 3, 2009

Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education at University of California, Irvine, critiques the current status of the open textbook development in the context of  educational change in his March 2009 paper titled:  Open Learning:  What Do Open Textbooks Tell Us About the Revolution in Education?  He asserts that the shift from traditional to openly available digitized textbooks represents “the most profound challenge that educators have ever faced.”

 

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