Archive for January, 2012

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Open Education Week and Upcoming Events

January 23, 2012

With recent announcements and events happening this week and over the next few months, 2012 is shaping up to be an interesting OER year.  CCCOER Staff and board members will be involved in the following efforts and we invite you to join us.Open Education Week

Open Education Week March 5-10

March 5-10, 2012 has been named Open Education Week and is devoted to creating awareness of open education and its benefits worldwide.  Please consider contributing a short video, handouts, highlighting your college’s open educational projects.  Submit your participation or email us at openeducationwk@gmail.com by Jan. 31st.

Apple eBook Counter-Revolution

I’m sure no one missed the Apple announcement last Thursday and it has been a disappointment for many of us in the OER community.   Although Apple is offering its iBook Authoring tool for free, the output format is proprietary and content offered through the iBook 2 store will be subject to an exclusive licensing agreement between you the author and Apple.  Whether the exclusive license agreement applies to OER is still debatable but there does not appear to be an easy way to specify a Creative Commons license at this time.

Open Licensing for Educators Starts Today (January 23)

If you still have administrators and faculty who develop that glazed look when you mention Creative Commons and open licensing, there is a free online workshop being offered this week on Open Licensing for Educators. It is being facilitated by several well-known OER leaders including Cable Green, Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons; Wayne Mackintosh, Director of the OER Foundation; Jane Hornibrook, Public Lead, Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand.  It is going to be a fun and interactive way to learn about open licensing and make new online friends.

Open Online Math Homework System Webinar January 31st

Our first CCCOER webinar of 2012 Open Online Math Homework Systems will be presented by math instructors David Lippman of Pierce College and Philip Sousa of Phoenix College next Tuesday, January 31st at 10:00 am Pacific.  If you use online homework systems in your courses to help improve student learning, please tune in to find out more about an open online system where you can customize the questions for your courses.

Lest you think we are abandoning the humanities, February’s webinar will be on English composition featuring Dr. Joe Moxley and staff of the writingcommons.org site and will take place Tuesday, February 28, at 10:00 am Pacific.   More details to follow here.

CCCOER Attending Conferences

CCCOER staff and board members will be attending educational conferences over the next few months and we want to meet up with members and share ideas in-person.   Please let us know if you will be attending any of the following:

  • eLearning Long Beach, CA Feb 19-22
  • ACCCA Long Beach, CA February 22-23
  • League of Innovation, Philadelphia, March 5-10
  • AACC Annual Meeting Orlando, FL, April 21-24
  • ACRL Iowa, May 25

Contact me, Una Daly, (email: unatdaly AT ocwconsortium.org)

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Higher Ed Disruption at Mid-Pacific ICT Conference

January 10, 2012
Winter ICT Educator Conference January 5-6, 2012

Winter ICT Educator Conference January 5-6, 2012

Last week, I presented at the Mid-Pacific ICT (MPICT) Conference in San Francisco Open Education Revolution: From Open Access to Open Partcipation highlighting new participatory models in open education and hung out with fellow “geek” faculty from community colleges nationwide.  We celebrated the founding of the new California ICT Collaborative headed by Pierre Thierry of City College San Francisco.  Along with cataloguing ICT offerings statewide to increase efficiency, Olivia Herriford, associate director of MPICT announced the diversity toolkit to encourage non-traditional students to pursue credentials and degrees in ICT.

“Closing the Digital Gap” keynote from Gordon Synder, director of the National Center for Information and Communications Technologies at Springfield Technical Community College in Massachusetts reminded us of the accelerating speed of technology adoption and our need to push content out to our students. Mobile networks are growing faster than broadband access throughout underserved areas in North America and worldwide.   A study by Blackboard and Project Tomorrow found that 98% of U.S. students have access to some sort of smart phone. 5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions were active in 2011 with 90% of worldwide population having some access versus only 2 billion with Internet access.  Smart phones sold exceeded PC units worldwide in 2010 and tablets are flooding the market.

Jim Gaston, associate director of Academic Technology, South Orange Community College District and lead for the Sherpa student guidance project issued a mandate for change in his “Higher Education Disruption” keynote. Leading us through numerous examples from other industries, he cited five common threads between higher education and the traditional music industry:  centralized control, lack of individualization, inflexible, rising costs, and perceived low ROI.  If a college education is simply becoming an expensive check-off, students will go elsewhere.   Mentioning Open Courseware offerings and skill-based badges as promising alternatives, he urged us to personalize education making it learner-centered, interactive, participatory, and mobile.  Educators can change lives for the better if we listen to students and focus on what makes their lives successful.

Keynotes and other archived presentations are available the California Community College’s CCC Confer project funded through the Chancellor’s office.

 

Happy 2012!

Una Daly, Community College Outreach Manager at the Open Courseware Consortium.

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