Here is the interview I had with Irwin DeVries (Director of Instructional Design for Thompson Rivers University: Open Learning, Canada) earlier this year, about how his institution was planning to implement the OER university concept.
The key take-away message that I got from this interview was Irwin's emphasis on the importance of the university's role as a creator and curator of the world's knowledge, and that for initiatives such as the OERu to survive and thrive, our universities need to remain strong. 
The people at Creative Commons are working on a new design for the "licence chooser" (http://creativecommons.org/choose) This page in the Creative Commons wiki gives the rationale for the changes. The new version of the licence chooser does not involve any changes to the licences themselves, but aims to provide better clarity for users on the different licences.
A prototype of the new licence chooser is available at http://staging.creativecommons.org/choose/ 
Universities must do more to help students develop as global citizens.
In this article from The Guardian Professiona, the writer gives a good rationale for the value of virtual learning communities that cross geographic and cultural borders, and gives an example of a Russian-Swedish-American intercultural communications project. The findings from the three-year project concluded that "these students cultivated greater inter-cultural sensitivity and developed more appropriate modes of dialogue across cultures."
Learning communities based around open educational resources and practices would probably show the same results. This document is an introduction to Open Learning. It examines briefly what “Open” means and the different facets of the open movement and what “Learning” means and how it is different for every person.
This looks like a nice resource by someone called Corbin who describes himself as an open learner. He is particularly interested in helping other independent open learners figure out how to organise their learning and maintain interaction with others to keep motivated. 
This article refers to the massive shortage of higher education places in South Africa, and mentions partnerships between government and private enterprise (e.g. City & Guilds) as a way of addressing the problem. I've added a comment suggesting that open education initiatives (such as the OER university for example, which South African's own mega-distance university, Unisa, is already involved in) might be a further partial solution. This is a summarised version of an interview I held with Dave Hall, Registrar of the University of Leicester, about his views on the OERu concept. He makes some very interesting comments - particularly with regard to research that has been done at Leicester around student retention and success rates. (The clue is in the title to the blog.) This is an important issue for discussion within the open education community: at the heart of our practice is the belief that flexibility will enable larger numbers of students to access higher education, but the evidence shows that that very same flexibility can create insurmountable barriers for students. Hmmm. 
Winston Hide, associate editor of Genomics, says its publisher Elsevier effectively denies developing world access to research findings...
This is a very courageous stand being taken by a South African scientist (now based at Harvard), who argues that he can no longer live with his conscience, editing articles in a journal that many contributors will never see in published form because they are based in developing countries and their institutions cannot afford the journal subscriptions. 
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Prof. Dalton Conley of Ney York University is to take a year's sabbatical and during this time will take on the role of dean of arts and sciences at the online University of the People, a non-profit institution aimed at widening access to higher education.
Extract from the article:
'As University of the People's dean of arts and sciences, Mr. Conley will work to expand course offerings. "We need to focus on pragmatic degrees that are going to help individuals in their societies, in developing countries," he says. He hopes the next two majors will be in health, to train nurses and community-health workers, and education, to train teachers.
'He says he and fellow administrators are not only waiting for accreditation, which they hope to gain soon, but are preparing the institution for what may follow. He says: "It could be that the floodgates open, and we have 100,000 students all of a sudden." ' 
A comparison of four open-access course providers (Berkely, MIT, P2PU, Saylor and U. of Wisconsin at Madison) in terms of five criteria: whether they include videotaped lectures, contact with professor, interaction with other students, option to take quizzes/ tests, and provision of homework assignments. It would be interesting to add more open access initiatives to the list, and to include accreditation for self-study as a criterion. This is a very lucid piece by David Wiley on the new Creative Commons licence that is under development. The gist of it is that the Non-Commercial (NC) clause has been used in many cases with "add-ons", in which individual authors or authoring teams have provided their own definition of NC for the purposes of a particular OER. This creates a problem when another user wants to remix two OERs, both of which ostensibly have the same licence (CC-BY-SA-NC) but both have included separate (and conflicting) definitions of NC for their respective items - effectively preventing anyone from combining the two. 
Academic spring campaign aims to make all taxpayer-funded academic research available for free online...
This is great news for UK researchers and the global public. according to this article from The Guardian:
"This initiative is most likely to result in a central repository that will host all research articles that result from public funding. The aim is that, even if an academic publishes their work in a traditional subscription journal, a version of their article would simultaneously appear on the freely available repository. The repository would also have built-in tools to share, comment and discuss articles."
University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls...
This is good news. As Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a US-based international library membership organisation (quoted in the article), says: "Other universities are likely to follow Harvard's example on this. If it starts at a university with the stature of Harvard, they will take a long hard look at whether this is something that makes sense for them to do as well. People watch Harvard. There's no grey area there." |
Superb essay by Louis Soares from the Center for American Progress and Amy Ostrom from Arizona State University:
A new “College as a Service” (CaaS) logic can help reframe a substantive debate that pulls together what seem to be very disparate strands of thinking regarding practices and policy. CaaS provides a systemic way of thinking about nettlesome challenges such as how a student’s customer profile of preferences, needs and active participation leads to student success; how information yields accountability; and how self-service can improve higher education.
This seems very relevant to the discussions that are happening in the open education community about offering value-added services to learners based on open educational resources. Via Shannon D. Smith, Jesús Salinas 
I began the #ioe12 open assessment module by watching the Badges for Lifelong Learning: An Open Conversation YouTube video. The video is a snappy introduction to the concept of open badges with endorsement for them from a number of senior educationalists/ academics and CEOs. Via Andreas Link, Robert Farrow, OLnet Team Last few days of the survey - I will be eternally grateful to everyone who supports this research :-)
The survey is open to people in higher education institutions everywhere. It aims to find out what the perceptions are about the OER university concept, and also to generate a benchmarking tool for institutions to check their compatibility with the OERu concept. Don't worry if you don't know much about the OERu - the questions are more about open practices at your own institution. (But if you do want some background info, have a look at http://wikieducator.org/OERu) 
Earlier this year I interviewed Kevin Bell, who spoke to me in his role as Associate Vice President for Learning and Development, College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University (USA). This is the transcript from that interview.
SNHU is partnering in innovative ways with charitable organisations such as United Way and the Gates Foundation, as well as employer bodies, to make higher education accessible to the "under-served" population of an estimated 20 million adult learners in the USA.
The quote from Kevin in the title is my all-time favourite about new models of open education :-) 
The University of California, San Fransisco, the largest scientific institution in the USA, has made a policy decision to make current and future scientific articles freely available to the public. This blog post contains the transcript of my interview with Vasi Doncheva, Flexible learning manager at NorthTec Polytechnic in New Zealand, about her institution’s implementation plans for the OER university.
The theme running through Vasi's comments was the commitment that NorthTec has to social inclusion and community service within the local and regional populations they serve. 
Require free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
"We’re asking for about five minutes of your time. Sign the petition to require free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. This will require you to create an account at the White House petition website, confirm the account by clicking on a link in your email, and then sign the petition itself...
"25,000 signatures in 30 days gets an official Administration response. We want to hit that number - blow it out of the water - to escalate this issue inside the White House. We believe the idea of requiring free access has support but is stuck. This could well be the event that gets it through." 
According to a report by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), universities are "playing a key role in the UK's innovation system and are an important driver for economic growth and recovery."
And: "HEFCE provides £150 million a year in HEIF funding for knowledge exchange to support and develop a broad range of knowledge-based interactions between universities and colleges and the wider world, which it says result in economic and social benefit to the UK."
There is no mention of open education or OERs in this article (or in the report it refers to), but surely open access (to both research and teaching resources) is an essential emerging aspect of knowledge exchange for innovation?
Nice blog post by Curt Bonk with lots of links to recent articles on MOOCs. And a link to a competition which seeks to get answers to the question: "Will edX Improve Higher Education?" 
OER definitions vary greatly, but there are themes. The original UNESCO definition from 2002 (just celebrating its 10th anniversary!) includes ready access to educational resources, enabled by info...
Nice summary by Irwin Devries (Thompson Rivers University, Canada) on the intricacies of "doing OERs". With a comment from me :-) 
In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans -- one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world -- Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership,...
So Harvard and MIT are joining forces to offer free courses, which will offer certificates to successful learners, but no credit. Each institution is putting in $30 million to the venture. At a time when most higher education institutions are tightening their belts, I wonder what the business model is for this altruism? Perhaps there's a clue in this article - is it that the metrics gained from mass-scale tracking of students can inform strategy for the income-generating side of the institutions? 
Academics, some from the University of Lincoln, concerned about rising tuition fees set up a university where students can learn for free.
This is an exciting initiative from a UK university.
Via Martin Weller |
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