Open learning news

Participation in MOOCs is being seen by some school leavers as an essential element for their college applications.

This is very exciting news and hopefully the start of a sensible trend. At the hear of the new bill is the following statement:

“No college student in [X] will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed.” – Steinberg, “California Bill Seeks Campus Credit for Online Study” (New York Times)

One of the very interesting aspects of this initiative is that 'this new CA online marketplace will require open licenses on all courses and textbooks as a condition for participation. That is, if Udacity, Coursera, edX, StraighterLine, Future Learn, or anyone else wants its courses to be considered for use in this initiative, the courses and textbooks will first need to be openly licensed. CC is pleased that Senator Steinberg plans to leverage California’s existing open textbook investment (all textbooks will be licensed under CC BY).'

The only thing I'm not sure I agree with is that Creative Commons are recommending that 'the marketplace only allow courses and textbooks openly licensed with any of the CC licenses that allow derivatives (or CC0) or similar open copyright licenses'. Basically they are excluding any CC licences with a 'non-derivatives' (ND) clause. I think this is unnecessarily restrictive - especially in the case of film or other creative works where the author does not want the original resource to be modified. I also suspect, based on the evidence that I'm aware of, that multi-media OERs are generally not edited by re-users anyway, and so including items that are CC-BY-ND licensed would not be perceived as a significant restriction by most people.

Anyway, this is definitely a great step forward for open education.

This issue of Open Praxis focuses on Openness in Higher Education, and has two articles on assessment within an open access framework - one from Dianne Conrad (Athabasca University, Canada), and one from Norm Friesen and Christine Wihak (both of Thompson Rivers University, Canada). Both articles deal with the concept of RPL (recognition of prior learning), also known as PLAR (prior learning accreditation and recognition). 

A nice, enthusiastic article by someone new to the whole concept of online learning and open education.

This is a very sobering article about the likely impact of austerity-related budget cuts in higher education in the UK.  The writer, Sir Steve Smith, is vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter.

If mainstream university activities have to be radically curtailed in line with these cuts, I wonder what lies in the future for MOOCs? He doesn't address this question - in fact he doesn't discuss MOOCs at all, except to say they are irrelevant in light of these enormous financial threats that universities are facing. One thing is certain though, and that is that the ethos of MOOCs (free and open learning opportunities for masses of people) is tied to the financial well-being of the institutions that offer them.  So perhaps he has a point, but perhaps MOOCs will utlimately lead to new business models for higher education, which will solve the money problem in unexpected ways. I hope so.

It was great to be part of the team that presented this series of "elevator pitches" at the OER13 conference this morning. You may notice that the countries are grouped together in rather unusual ways - this was just because of the way countries were allocated to speakers (and not because Hungary is suddenly in a special alliance with Scandinavia and the USA... or the UK with France, Romania and Poland). The aim of the presentation was to give a snapshot of open educational resources (OER) policies, existing or emerging, in countries around the world, based on research by the European-funded POERUP project (www.poerup.info). 

This is an open invitation to join the Webinar with Grainne Conole, Terese Bird, Ming Nie, Bernard Nkuyubwatsi and myself at a free webinar on 11 March, 12:30-2pm UK time. I'll be chairing, and the others will each give their perspective on a particular aspect of open education:

Grainne Conole - open education and learning design

Terese Bird - open education going mobile

Ming Nie - policy developments in open education around the world

Bernard Nkuyubwatsi - a view from the developing world (Rwanda) on open education

Please re-tweet/ re-scoop and spread the word - this is going to be a great session!

Scroll down through the EFQUEL website and you'll see "Open Learning Recognition: Taking Open Educational Resources a Step Further". This is the final report of the excellent OERtest project, in which members of eight European institutions studied the issues around accrediting learning based on open educational resources. The report includes the seven scenarios developed by the project team which were considered to be the most likely routes for institutions to offer credit, such as "OER Traditional", "OER Erasmus" and "OER Takeaway".