On 17 Nov, the SCORE people at the OU will be hosting an event looking at the past, present and future of OER activity, and what it will take for all of us involved in OERs to make this activity sustainable.
This is an important question. David Wiley may have given a clue to the answer in his recent keynote address (see http://bit.ly/rliovG). He emphasised the importance of making openness work for our own institutions. This isn't how all OER projects work - many of them have been more outward-facing - although, oddly, without any defined audience other than a hoped-for mass of prospective students. So... a shift towards meeting existing institutional needs via open practices would be something of a paradigm shift - and would, I think, make our OER activity more self-sustaining.
Open learning news
Wayne Mackintosh has produced a great video for Open Education Week, explaining what the OERu is and how OERu partner institutions plan to address the learning needs of millions of adults who would otherwise not have access to higher education. 
Cable Green from Creative Commons writes about the debate taking place the USA around the Bill that allocates 1.5% of district school curriculum funds to the creation of openly licensed materials. In an apparently desperate attempt to hold onto their competitive advantage, 'Publishers are telling Washington state senators that "Creartive Commons is a proprietary interest and not a General licensing entity."'
As Green so neatly puts it, 'If their (publishers') quality is Indeed as superior as they claim, They shouldn't have any trouble competing with open educational resources. 
On 6th and 7th March 2012, the University of Leicester will be running a series of three webinars entitled "Enabling universal access to higher education via openness and collaboration?" to celebrate Open Education Week.
Confirmed speakers include Jim Taylor (University of Southern Queensland), Grainne Conole (University of Leicester), George Siemens (Athabasca University), Martin Weller and Patrick McAndrew (Open University UK), Sandra Wills (Wollongong University) and Vasi Doncheva (Northtec Polytechnic New Zealand).
The series is jointly hosted by the TOUCANS and ELKS projects at the Beyond Distance Research Alliance, in partnership with the Open University's SCORE Programme and HEFCE.
This is a great opportunity to hear some of the best informed and most inspiring speakers in the field of open education.
For more information and registration, please go to http://toucansproject.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/webinars/.
Please come and join the discussion - it's open to all! And please tweet/ forward/ share this link :-)
On Jan 19th I presented findings from our Evaluation and Synthesis study of the UKOER (Open Educational Resources) Programme funded by the UK Joint Informations Systems Committees and the Higher Education ... Via Tania Rowlett 
A great example of how Apple's new iBook Author is beginning to spark off creative thinking amongst teachers about content creation. I especially like the writer's table of teacher and learner roles. There are so many ways that we can design engaging learning experiences for our students: ironically, the new Apple software is at the traditional (teacher-centred) end of the spectrum.
What would a course look like that is the other end of the spectrum (the Learner Research Inquiry end)? A MOOC, perhaps? There's been a lot of activity amongst OERu (Open Educational Resource university) members over the last month - I'm going to summarise it in this post, as there doesn't seem to be any single point... In a study conducted by IPTS, TNO, the Open University of the Netherlands and AtticMedia for the European Commission on the future of learning we developed s...
Excellent videos showing five different types of learners in 2024. One of the key elements will be the application of guidelines and procedures for the validation of informal and non-formal learning (European guidelines available at http://goo.gl/XXArA).
OERs will play a central role in enabling adults to return to work after an absence or reskill for alternative forms of employment. 
The Stanford University professor who achieved overnight fame for drawing more than 160,000 online students to his free course on artificial intelligence (http://goo.gl/qRMQr) has been hooked by the appeal of teaching to massive audiences via the Web, and has given up his day job to go solo.
“I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill,” he said. “And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”
He's not hallucinating: he's obviously done his sums. He only needs $2 from each participant and he'll be a millionnaire. Assuming he gets his 500,00 students. MITx differs from OpenCourseWare (OCW) in several important ways, but there is the possibility of confusing the two. Here’s a breakdown of what MITx is and what it isn’t, and how it compares to OCW.
The recently-launched MITx adds to the plethora of emerging OER-plus-added-value platforms. I found this description of the difference between MITx and open courseware (OCW) useful. 
OER-based initiatives in which learners can study for free and ultimately get a certificate or degree seem to be the Next Big Thing in OERs. This one - NextGenU - is focusing on health sciences and has an impressive list of institutions in Africa, South America, Canada and the USA signed up to participate. It's based at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
The idea is that students can follow programmes with the support of "designees" at their own institutions, and can then take exams that are "proctored" (invigilated, in UK English!) by someone at their own institution - or they can take an exam online and be monitored by a surveillance camera etc. Students would ultimately get credits from their local institutions. 
Rather than restricting access to publicly funded scientific research, the rule should be: if taxpayers paid for it, they own it.
This is an opinion piece in the New York Times by Michael Eisen (associate professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley), who warns that a new bill in the USA House of Representatives threatens to cripple a web site in which the results of taxpayer-funded medical research are made freely available.
There is some discussion between Rory McGreal and others about this at https://landing.athabascau.ca/pg/blog/read/96279/exchange-on-oer-list-on-the-research-works-act-in-the-us. David Wiley has just announced that he is taking on a new role as Senior Fellow for Open Education at a non-profit organisation, sponsored by the US Department of Education called Digital Promise. He will be doing this in addition to his existing role at Brigham Young University in Utah. 
If, like me, you took a holiday from the Web over the festive season and are wondering what you missed, this blog post by Paul Stacey in British Columbia is a great reflection on all the developments in the open access movement in 2011. |
Very thought-provoking piece by Tony Bates, who wonders what the business model is for MITx. (Philanthropy, drawing on MIT's proverbially deep pocket... or genuinely self-sustaining?) Also, whether automated feedback combined with peer interaction will enable the same quality of learning as support from a flesh-and-blood tutor. Brilliant! BC Campus in Vancouver has just published a "corporate statement" on their "open agenda". It basically states that everything they create is published under an open licence; all meetings will be live-streamed where feasible, and photos, notes and tweets during meetings will be published under an open licence. No more consent forms needed from meeting participants - just send them the statement. This has got to be the way forward for organisations committed to open practices.
Needless to say, the statement itself is published under a Creative Commons licence for other institutions to reuse - with attribution, of course :-)
Thanks to Paul Stacey (in an interview I've just had with him about BC Campus' role in the OERu - more about that shortly) for alerting me to this. SCoPE, an initiative from BC Campus in Canada, is hosting an online conversation about writing e-books - it started on 1 Feb and continues to 14 Feb - in which contributors' posts will be compiled into... you've guessed it, an e-book :-)
Great idea and there are some interesting discussion threads there. It's open to everyone who wants to contribute - you just have to create a (free) account to be able to post. 
The 13 OERu partners (called OERTen - OERu Tertiary Education Network) have been collaborating to generate a list of "propotype" courses that they will offer in the pilot starting in September. Eight have now been shortlisted - discussion amongst member institutions is under way to make final decisions.
The algorithms used to create the shortlist (neatly described as "creative number crunching") are explained - this is another great model from the Wikieducators of collaborative decision-making. "Language Teachers worldwide are invited to fill in this Two-Minute Survey on Open Language Learning. This survey is part of a research project by Jozef Colpaert, University of Antwerp, and Glenn Stockwell, Waseda University, Tokyo, aiming at identifying factors which might impact on the use of Open Educational Resources in the Language Learning and Teaching Community worldwide...
"We apologize for the fact that this survey is only available in English." 
As of the beginning of 2012, the ALT (Association for Learning Technology) Journal, Research in Learning Technology, is open access. All articles are available under a Creative Commons (CC-By 3.0) licence. That includes all past issues too.
Well done ALT! 
The OER Foundation and Ako Aotearoa (New Zealand's National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence) are offering an open course on open content licensing for educators. It started yesterday, and continues throughout the week. Eeven if you're not an enrolled participant, you can still access the course materials because they're all... Open Educational Resources :-) 
Not enough people have acknowledged that the opposition was arguing two totally different different points - the "you're going about it the wrong way" group and the "we want our illegal movies!" group.
This is a sober reflection by David Pogue (New York Times) on the PIPA-SOPA outcry that darkened the Internet for 24 hours earlier this week. OK, I take his point that there are nuances to the opposition to these two bills in the US, but the bottom line is still that they were a fundamental threat to free speech on the Web.
Anyway, the good news is that "the protests were effective. There’s no chance that the bills will become law in their current forms." Let's hope so. 
And the next one to offer a new way for people to get a university education for free is... Apple. Sure, they've had iTunes U for a long time, but with their new interface, lecturers/authors can "push" their latest lectures out to students, giving the impression of a live course, where students receive new materials or assignments at specific intervals.
At the same time, the newly launched, free "iBooks textbooks for iPad" app enables teachers to produce beautiful, media-rich e-books for students - without having to pay for software like InDesign. (See http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks for an almost tear-jerkingly feelgood video ad.) All good stuff, except for one thing: the "free" in "free new app" is just that... it's a free app for everyone... who owns an iPad.
Thanks, Apple for showing us (again!) what's possible: I'm watching this space for the open source (or at least untethered-to-one-commercial-platform) answer to the challenge. The primary objective of the project is to test the feasibility of mainstreaming the use of open educational resources as a mode of training provision within Higher Education.
OERtest is a two-year project (Oct 2012 to Sep 2012) that aims to pilot the concept of assessing learning exclusively achieved through the use of OERs. Eight European bodies are collaborating on this: the Universities of Bologna, Edinburgh, Granada and Duisburg-Essen, as well as the UN University, SCIENTER, EFQUEL and the Open University of Catalunya. The project is funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission.
One of the project's outcomes will be to have a curated "clearing house" (repository) for OERs that meet the metadata and quality criteria for inclusion. At this point, the Clearing House seems to be accessible only to project members with passwords.
This is going to be an interesting initiative to watch - it's very similar to the OERu concept, and being located in a single region with some existing agreement around standards and accreditation (thanks to the Bologna Accords) might make the credit transfer issues less of a headache. Witnesses have told of the horror of a stampede at the University of Johannesburg, during which a woman who'd accompanied her child to try for last-minute admission, was crushed to death.
What a horrific story. Thousands of people lined up outside the University of Johannesburg on Monday night to be at the front of the queue for admissions on Tuesday morning. By early Tuesday morning the queue was 3km long, with aspiring students and their family members waiting hopefully, as a consequence of the university announcing that it would accept late applications from those who missed an earlier deadline or recently became eligible thanks to their exam scores. It was estimated that about 11,00 people were vying for as few as 800 places.
Paul Prinsloo from Unisa mentions this story in his blog (http://goo.gl/72NHP) and notes the importance of distance education for such students who cannot get places in campus-based programmes. But as Paul mentions, even massive scale institutions like Unisa (with 400,000+ enrolled students) have their limits and must turn prospective students away.
The need for an open distance university on a global scale, like the OERu (http://wikieducator.org/Oeru), has never been greater. 
Copyright developments and licensing, in relation to the UK HEIs and the progress of OERs...
A new Scoop.it blog by Tania Rowlett, copyright guru supremo in the University of Leicester library, and ex-member of the OTTER and OSTRICH projects at Leicester, where she advised the OER project teams on copyright and IPR issues. Definitely one to follow! |
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