Open Educational Resources (OER)

An Introduction to EU grants programmes. This is the first of three Modules on how to access EU Programmes

The NMC Horizon Report > 2013 K-12 Edition recognizes cloud computing and mobile learning as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the first horizon of one year or less. Learning analytics and open content are seen in the second horizon of two to three years; and 3D printing and virtual and remote laboratories emerged in the third horizon of four to five years.

The resulting publication, The Future of Creative Commons (2.7 MB PDF), lays out priorities for each area in which we work. These overall priorities are already guiding staff in how they use their time and set targets for each program area. They also give us a good base to measure how well we are doing.

As a companion piece, we offer this annual report, Dispatches from the Commons. In it, we call out some of the big accomplishments of the past year and highlight organizations and people who are doing powerful and innovative things with our licenses.

HEFCE funding for OER initiatives followed the JISC Good Intentions report in 2009 and has, in many ways, provided some of the scaffolding and support for a variety of individuals, communities and institutions to move forwards in their own journeys, whether they started years before in other contexts or had just joined on the road to open sharing.

CC BY is not essential for Open Access. However, making a paper Open Access without the CC BY licence, or with a more restrictive type of Creative Commons licence (e.g. CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC), may mean that a reader must still obtain your specific permission to adapt the work and/or use it for commercial purposes.

The different flavours of CC licence enable you to be more restrictive if you want to be, but obviously the Government/RCUK wants its publicly funded research to be as unrestricted as possible.

CC BY just gives a more liberal blanket permission for some actions.

Open content licensing for educators is a free online workshop designed for educators who want to learn more about open education resources, copyright, and creative commons licenses. This workshop will:
- Reflect on the practice of sharing knowledge in education and the permissions educators consider fair and reasonable;
- Define what constitutes an open education resource (OER);
- Explain how international copyright functions in a digital world;
- Introduce the Creative Commons suite of licenses and explain how they support open education approaches;
- Connect with educators around the world to share thoughts and experiences in relation to copyright, OER and Creative Commons.

The eTekkatho library contains over 900 full text academic resources. This first edition of the library covers human geography (including urban and rural geography, economic geography and development studies), physical geography (including hydrology, natural hazards and disasters, and remote sensing and GIS), earth sciences and the environment along with supporting subjects of computer literacy, mathematics and English language.

Creative Commons, die Organisation hinter dem gleichnamigen Set an alternativen Urheberrechtslizenzen, hat gestern nicht nur einen Rückblick auf das vergangene Jahr veröffentlicht, sondern auch ein Strategie-Dokument mit dem Titel “The Future of Creative Commons” (PDF, 2,7 MB). Auf 20 Seiten werden darin zuerst noch einmal die grundlegenden Ideen und das Konzept der Creative-Commons-Lizenzen erklärt, bevor dann fünf strategische Ziele genauer ausgeführt werden.

Times are changing, and boundaries between higher education and vocational education systems are becoming more and more blurred. We can imagine for example that a university and a VET provider collaborate to organise programmes of high professional qualification; or the short specialized “executive” courses that HEIs provide to company professionals. In order to create more transparency and mutual trust between educational systems, quality assurance can contribute to solutions. New questions then arise, such as:
- Are Quality Assurance approaches really different in VET and Higher Education?
- What happens when there is a single authority dealing with both?
- Are there convergence areas in the way VET and Higher Education Quality Assurance are evolving?

The eLearning Africa Report 2013 is a comprehensive  survey of the experience and opinions of professionals and  practitioners from 42 African countries. It shows just how technology  is affecting learning and teaching in Africa.