Online education is witnessing its own Avengers-like uniting of superhero forces as Harvard University and MIT recently announced “edX”, a combined $60 million joint initiative to offer their college-level courses online for free. Launching in the fall of 2012, edX is a not-for-profit organization formed by the two universities to bring each institution’s free online course offerings to a broader global audience 
Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and the Vatican's Biblioteca Apostolica plan to digitise 1.5 million ancient texts to make them available online. This briefing paper on Open Practices is based on outcomes of the UK OER programme (phase 2). It was produced by the UK OER support and evaluation team in February 2012 to review evidence of relations between use and reuse of open educational resources and other aspects of open practice in education. Malcolm Brown, ELI director, and Veronica Diaz, ELI associate director, moderate this seminar with Judy Baker. Openly licensed educational content, commonly referred to as open educational resources (OER), offers educators an unprecedented opportunity to reexamine how they teach and how students learn. OER and open textbooks have served as catalysts for dramatic pedagogical innovation involving collaborative teaching and learning. Such rapid growth of a knowledge-sharing culture is not without challenges, however. Concerns include quality, sustainability, cost-shifting from students to institutions, and co-optation of the open education movement by entrepreneurs. After reviewing terminology, showing examples, and discussing the benefits and disadvantages of OER, we will explore the meaning and utility of open-licensing options for educators’ use of learning materials and textbooks and discover how to find, vet, use, and develop OER in ways that augment, and ideally enhance, our existing teaching strategies. Use this seminar to help you decide if the OER movement is mostly hype or truly transformative. Via OLnet Team OER or open educational resources is one of the good news stories of 2011... In the context of higher education news stories about rising costs, tuition and student debt, this must be our “man bites dog” news story. 
Open video is the movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video. OVC is a two-day summit to explore the future of video on the web. 
Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse. Footage from audiovisual collections can be downloaded and remixed into new works. Users of Open Images also have the opportunity to add their own material to the platform and thus expand the collection. Open Images also provides an API, making it easy to develop mashups. Via Chris Follows, Score Project, Kent Wallén A quick history and infographic courtesy of SourceNinja helps shed some light on the history of open source software. 
Open access is in the news again. Index on Censorship held a debate on open data on December 6th. 
The UK government has signalled a revolution in scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind the idea that all publicly funded scientific research must be published in open-access journals. 
Collection of ideas and resources for open research and open education...
Providing an online repository for high quality Public Domain vector graphics on the internet... |
David Wiley, nationally recognized scholar, teacher, and expert on open education, will speak in Knight Library’s Browsing Room at 4 p.m. on Thursday, May 17. The lecture is presented as part of the Philip H. 
News and Information from ArnoldIT.com about Search and Content Processing... 
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has launched a new online resource that will allow users to search, browse, share and download more than 20,000 images in the museum's collection. 
A number of OER university thought leaders will open the University of Leicester series of webinars for Open Education Week. Register your seat today: http://goo.gl/ITeyy
Further Information
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), Vasi Doncheva (Northtec Polytechnic) and Anthony Camilleri (EFQUEL and OERtest). 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 the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
For more information and registration, please go to http://toucansproject.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/webinars/.
To go straight to registration, please see http://goo.gl/ITeyy . Via Andreas Link 
Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers by Jeffrey Beall 2012 Edition - Predatory, open-access publishers are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing... 
If SOPA passes, global knowledge sharing could come to a grinding halt. 
'MITx' will offer courses online and make online learning tools freely available. 
This briefing paper offers insight into various open access business models, from institutional to subject repositories, from open access journals to research data and monographs. This overview shows that there is a considerable variety in business models within a common framework of public funding. 
The number of images, audio files, movies and other files available under a Creative Commons license is enormous, as Sean demonstrates in this post. Check out his list of over 30 useful sites for sourcing Creative Commons media. European commission follows UK and French lead with proposals to release more public sector information... 
There is a supply side and a demand side to scholarly communication. The supply side is the creation of scholarly works, including writing, peer review, editing, and the form of publication. The demand side is much more elusive—the mental state of the audience that leads them to “buy” what the supply side has produced. 
Free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. |
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