This study is a comparison AU Press with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on actual physical book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.
This study is a comparison AU Press with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on actual physical book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. Results suggest that there is no significant difference in the ranking of printed books sold by AU Press in comparison with traditional university presses. However, AU Press, can demonstrate a significantly larger readership for its books as evidenced by thousands of downloads of the open electronic versions.
Open access web radio can inspire experimentation, establish community, & provide a powerful platform for informal learning & collaboration.
This session will be an informal panel discussion on webcasting which will use the audio and video webstreams associated with an open digital storytelling course (DS106) based at Univ. of Mary Washington as an example of the power of open web radio to inspire experimentation, foster creativity, establish community, and provide a platform for informal learning and collaboration.
DS106 participants use the course radio station to showcase their audio assignments but anyone interested is welcome to upload audio files that will stream on ds106radio. An ever-growing number of us have also been experimenting with live broadcasts which have proven to be a kind of a community bonding experience, not to mention a whole lot of fun. Live programming on DS106 radio originates from all over the world (Canada, US, Japan, England, New Zealand, Australia and Indonesia) and ranges from brief field reports (including, most notably, compelling live status reports after the massive earthquake in Japan to multi-participant guitar jam sessions to conference presentations to themed sets of songs interspersed with commentary to free-form radio mayhem. Live broadcasts have given the handful of DS106Radio faithful a way of "playing radio" and have proven a tremendously powerful tool for learning, experimenting with, and pushing the limits of the medium, all out in the open.
This informal panel discussion will feature some of the most frequent contributors to DS106Radio who will discuss some of the technical aspects of DS106Radio but will focus primarily on the ways in which the webstream and its context within a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) has enabled a formation of an international community (aided by fervent Tweeting) and all manner of experimentation. The panel will likely feature audio clips of past broadcasts, (if we're lucky) live calls from Japan, England and Australia and will itself likely be broadcast live over DS106Radio.
Tired of the never-ending debate about "Which license for OER?" We agree! Perhaps we should talk about "Which assets" instead.
For too many projects, and for too long, the OER community has grappled with the proper interpretation of open-content licenses, their use, and possible sustainability strategies built around them. The Creative Commons licensing suite has emerged as the global standard for OER licensing, yet it has not lessened, let alone solved, this debate. The problem can be distilled to three key issues: 1) there is more than one CC license, 2) interpretation of some licensing terms (such as the non-commercial term) is subjective, and 3) the license chosen is widely perceived to be a key factor in determining workable sustainability models for OER use and production.
In this session, we will examine each of these issues, paying particular attention to their effects on people's perceptions of OER, the different ways in which licenses are justified and used, and the overall impact on the progress (or lack thereof) of the field.
We will also discuss whether it could be helpful to shift the frame of the debate, from "Which license?" to "Which assets?" In brief, the contention here is that the persistent focus on licensing has stifled the emergence of creative new production, use, and delivery models and reduced the impact of OER accordingly. One option is to embrace hybrid production models, where all "OER" are released with as few restrictions possible (e.g., under CC BY), but not all resources (from a given producer) need be released as OER. We are hoping that the discussion will reveal other options as well.
We are anticipating that we will be able to integrate the insights gained from this discussion into helpful resources for both existing practitioners and newcomers to the OER field.
Can we increase OER uptake with seamless LMS integration?: Realizing opportunities for OER discoverability and data exchange in the LMS.
A key factor in OER uptake is the ability of resources to be easily accessed, combined with other course materials, and presented in an appropriate context for learning. For many instructors, the learning management system (LMS) is the information hub of their course. To extend the reach of OER we feel it is critical for resources to be made easily accessible from within the LMS. This need is greater than providing a simple link. From the LMS, OERs should be discoverable to students and instructors who want to use, support a single sign on interface, provide coherent navigation between LMS and OER, and seamlessly exchange key data (e.g. roster, grades, learning analytics).
In this presentation, we will share the Open Learning Initiative's approach to learning management system integration. We will survey current open standards for learning tools with the LMS and discuss our decision to implement Basic LTI. We will share our usability research on the user interface affordances required to drive a productive experience. We will also discuss the technical, user support, process and policy challenges we encountered while bringing OLI to the LMS.
Looking beyond OLI, we will make the case for improved methods and standards for integrating OER with LMS. While today's standards allow learning environment to report simple score outcomes to the LMS, the more robust measures of learning required to drive learning analytics remain locked up in individual tools. The result is that it is difficult to mix resources and achieve a unified view of how learning is progressing and the overall effectiveness of the learning design. We feel this is a missed opportunity. The next generation of standards and LMS systems will need to simplify the discovery and adoption of OER and facilitate finer grained data exchange.
How can academic libraries be better partners in open education?
For more than 10 years, academic libraries have been active players in the open access movement through organizations like the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). SPARC has played a role in reducing journal costs, promoting author rights, and setting high standards for peer review. Additionally, academic libraries support open access through institutional repositories, digital publishing, and digital collections of unique and rare holdings. Within the framework of open education, are these priorities -- building institutional repositories, educating authors about their rights, and online publishing -- sufficient contributions? While adept at collecting and organizing content, are libraries effectively meeting new needs for digital preservation and access? What can open education practitioners and academic libraries learn from each other about creating and sharing metadata, information literacy, or integrating primary source material into curricula? Through a discussion of these questions, this session aims to identify the most important opportunities for academic libraries in advancing open access and open scholarship.
How do you construct online communities of help around open education content to optimize the learning experience?
Mere openness neither solves every problem nor comes w/o issues. Let's explore the moral, ethical, and other dilemmas inherent to sharing.
Developing a profile of our global audience through aggregated surveys of OER and OCW users worldwide.
What are the cognitive and cultural barriers to openness, and how does understanding them help to promote broader openness?
A conversation with the desire to identify the core ways in which people are naturally or culturally conditioned to be suspicious of or opposed to openness; then to use that information to think about ways to build bridges to individuals or institutions locked into closed mindsets.
OER Glue lets you pervasively mash up the web for teaching and learning by mashing up web pages in place and integrating with everyone.
OER Glue supports authentic learning experiences by erasing the boundaries between systems and between content silos. It allows you to mash up content where you find it, rather than copying it into a new system. Instead of re-implementing tools such as blog, discussion, and quiz tools, OER Glue integrates with everyone. You can adapt any web page for your context by dragging and dropping images, videos, and interactive tools into it. OER Glue integrates with Google docs, Facebook, Twitter and other online tools via a dock displayed at the bottom of your web browser, providing an outline tool that you can add pages to, and by letting you drag widgets directly into any web page. OER Glue also lets you easily search a database of over 100,000 open education resources for use in a course.
We will present research on how OER Glue has been used to reuse and adapt open education resources. Research findings will be explained in the context of the goal of increasing the impact of open education resources. Examples will be shared demonstrating how OER Glue can be used to enhance existing online courses by searching content databases, modifying web pages, and by integrating content and tools from other websites.
Join our discussion around OER, digital instructional materials, online curriculum, statewide Textbook Adoption policies and procedures. Three individuals from the Utah State Office of Education will share Utah's experiences, problems and opportunities around adoption, licensing, digital devices, and quality control.
This presentation will introduce my first attempt at writing an open textbook. The goal is to create an interactive text for "Introduction to Literacy Studies Course." To date I've received grants and purchased SoftChalk. This summer I will complete the outline for the work. In August, I will offer my new graduate students a proposal that they can't turn down--the chance to become co-authors in a text for their first course.
An OER Publishing API and the ecosystem it can foster, or "Let the machines do the walking, so teachers can do the talking."
In this presentation I will give a progress report on my fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation to create an OER roadmap that will help foster an active ecosystem of tools and services that make it much easier to create, adapt, and remix OER. In this progress report, I will show working prototypes created to accelerate OER creation and adaptation, designed with educators and communities in order to support their content creation, translation, adaptation, and sharing needs. I will give a brief overview of the OER publishing protocol that makes them possible. Further, I will show how educators, learners, and innovators can build on this work. Although the talk will mention standards and protocols, it will be kept at a high level for a general audience and concentrate on how sharing and remixing is made easier and what the future ecosystem may hold.
Are commercial publishers friend or foe of open education? Come challenge five assumptions about the role of commercial publishers in OER.
Are commercial publishers friend or foe of open education? This session will challenge five common assumptions about the role of commercial publishers in the open education movement. The presenter will share lessons learned from the frontlines of the $8 billion college textbook industry, and demonstrate why profit motives and financial incentives can be critical elements in fostering a healthy open education ecosystem that helps increase the mainstream popularity, usage and long-term financial sustainability of OER.
This session will begin with a brief overview of the disruptive business model of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of free and open textbooks. The presenter will then challenge five common assumptions about the private sector and open textbooks.
Specifically:
1. Commercial activity is counter to the goals of the open education movement. Widespread use of high-quality OER is a shared goal within the open community. The presenter will discuss how a commercial publisher can play a central role in the creation, distribution and usage of OER that helps move it from the fringes to the center of the national conversation on higher education.
2. If you build open content they will come. While a few open content sites attract thousands of users, most do not. For many faculty, open educational content is regarded as ancillary to their primary textbook. The presenter will walk through the adoption process to illustrate why it takes a publisher with a demonstrated track record in developing and marketing textbooks, along with a significant investment, to compete with the vast commercial catalogs and sales and marketing operations of large academic publishers,
3. The non-commercial clause is not in the spirit of true openness.Copyright holders have different objectives for their creations. While the non-commercial clause isn't suitable for all, for a professional publisher to reach scale and build a sustainable model around open, the non-commercial clause may be not only appropriate, but necessary for long-term survival.
4. There's already more than enough open content out there. Supply, not demand, remains a hurdle for the mainstream adoption of OER. There is a distinction between open content and adoptable open content. The presenter will provide examples of the kind of support and supplemental teaching materials faculty expect from a textbook publisher, and the resources required to change the perception, among many faculty, that free comes at the expense of quality.
5. Authors shouldn't profit from writing openly-licensed textbooks. There are many motivations for writing open textbooks. For academic authors seeking to do the right thing for students and be fairly compensated for their work, the commercial open textbook model makes sense. The presenter will share examples of both first-time and market-leading authors who have embraced the commercial open textbook model as a way to improve textbook affordability and enjoy a more sustainable income stream for years to come.
Participatory online learning environments offer tantalizing opportunities for evaluation, but how? Examples, opportunities, challenges will be discussed.
Current aspirations for the outcome of formal K-12 education have progressed beyond emphasis of content acquisition by students. As interest in developing higher order thinking skills grows, so does the interest in measuring the development of these skills in students. Problem solving, communication, and collaboration are not competencies that can be evaluated by multiple-choice tests. Observing students in the midst of their skill performances offers better opportunity for meaningful evaluation of these skills. Established methodologies (case studies, etc.) exist, however, scaling them remains a largely unmet challenge. Because of its anytime, anywhere, anyone mission and nature, Open Education has a particularly critical need for new evaluation methods, both for learners to mark their own progress AND for providers to evaluate and improve their Open Educational Resources and the programs.
Because of their online, digital nature, open education programs (programs employing and supporting participatory use of Open Educational Resources) offer tantalizing opportunities to measure higher order skill development by analysis of online participation of and contributions made by learners. In particular, the real-time data logs of learner and educator activity maintained by online learning platforms offer exciting new opportunities for constant formative evaluation of higher-order thinking performances. Because these logs exist in scalable data warehouses, there is exciting potential for these data to provide teachers with just-in-time feedback on particular students and for aggregated data to evaluate skill growth across learning communities. These opportunities are paired with significant challenges around organizing data for efficient human evaluation, developing computational algorithms for meaningful evaluation of student work that can meaningfully inform learning and practice, tracking students across multiple platforms in light of student privacy and protection laws and guidelines, and many others.
We will offer two *brief* examples and then facilitate a discussion of the possibilities and challenges of leveraging open education platforms to more meaningfully evaluate student learning. First, we will hear from an ongoing study by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who are investigating learning as exhibited in classroom wikis. Project Manager Justin Reich will briefly share their approach to evaluating expert thinking, complex communication, and new media literacy skills within these very diverse learning environments. Second, we will hear from Vital Signs (www.vitalsignsme.org), an open education/ citizen science program of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Program Manager Sarah Kirn will share their progress in creating an evaluation approach to leverage the rich dataset of online student contributions (text, images, drawings, comments) to evaluate the development of higher order thinking skills in participants.
Our discussion will engage session attendees on common challenges, opportunities, and possible approaches for using participation data and participant contributions to evaluate learning and development of higher order skills.
Sustainability education offers opportunities to extend the reach of open education and deepen its engagement with the academy.
When one uses "sustainability" in the context of open education, the word usually relates to whether or not an initiative has solid funding or a viable business model. Yet the growing movement of sustainability education offers a range of promising opportunities to extend the reach of open education and perhaps deepen its engagement with the academy.
This presentation will consider the thematic and practical parallels between the two movements. The many definitions of "sustainability" itself must be considered. Concepts such as "the commons", "non-rivalrous resources", "reuse", "inputs and outputs" will be explored from both
perspectives. More concrete questions such as carbon footprints and human work will also be considered.
These broader issues will be focused in part through a case study examination of The University of British Columbia, which has worked to coordinate open and sustainability education initiatives. This case will illustrate how sustainability education can serve as a strategic driver for openness across the institution, as well as promote a more permeable university that engages the wider community. Several projects will be discussed, not the least an open-source, small-pieces-loosely-joined, bottom-up, radical-reuse open content management framework that has enjoyed massive growth over the past year.
B2S: Reusing UK OERs in US CC's in basic math and learning to learn online; design req, lessons learned and new approaches described.
The Next Generation Learning Challenge has provided a call to action for those involved in Open Educational Resources to meet the needs of the US education system. One of the challenges is to deploy open core courseware to address the retention and completion issues in community colleges. In the Open Learning: Bridge to Success (B2S) initiative The Open University working in partnership with MIT, Anne
Arundel Community College (AACC) and University of Maryland University College (UMUC) will develop open bridging modules to help learners having problems in coping with credit bearing courses. Modules focussed on
learning to learn and understanding mathematics will be released as complete open educational resource packages from The Open University's
existing successful programme of entry-level (pre-degree) "Openings" modules. The Open University has an established open presence through its OpenLearn open content site which offers a wide range of units, and the courses will be developed in the open to benefit not only
students in the partner institutions but any learners who wish to use them.
The project will run its first pilots with Community College students from September and this presentation focuses on the early phase of the project including: release of the initial materials, augmentation with other OER, design of the research methodology and early lessons from working together as partners. Already working in the open is changing how we think about the provision of content and the instruction of practical experiences alongside meeting curriculum needs. We anticipate presenting the design requirements and how they have been
met through open provision, reflections from those involved in the projects, the first feedback from students at the pilot colleges, and the indications from the additional users in the open.
A practical approach to vetting, curating, and developing online resources in the form of courses.
When The Saylor Foundation first entered and surveyed the open education space two years ago, we identified four major problems with the OER terrain.
-First, excellent content is disaggregated and even hidden or buried;
-Second, many content providers are "recreating the wheel," whether informed by the "not made here" frame of mind or by the general difficulty of finding materials and making them interoperable, leaving entire fields and subjects largely devoid of useful content;
-Third, content is difficult to assess in terms of quality, as there are no validating metrics or tools at the public's disposal;
-And finally, even where excellent, discoverable content exists, there are no end-to-end solutions that organize and contextualize all of the content a student needs to know to master a given subject, course, or even discipline.
While there are any number of approaches to solving these problems, both separately and in conjunction with one another (meta-tagging tools and OER search engines come to mind), we decided that we could address all four issues by developing a structured content aggregation and curation process, by which professors seek, vet, frame, and, where appropriate, add to existing resources in order to yield complete courses, hosted on a central site and tied to user outcomes, assessments, and pre-defined learning taxonomies. We would like to focus our presentation on the content aggregation portion of our process, as we believe that this step will impact the most stakeholders in the OER community.
When we aggregate content, we are looking for accurate, easy-to-access, approachably written resources. We acquaint our professors with known open content repositories and textbook sites and encourage teams to share discipline-specific resources, for example, Smarthistory, Google Art, and Flickr for the Art History team, Professor Kimball's Biology Pages and iSpot for the biology team, and so on. By beginning our process with learning taxonomies and outcomes in place, we are able to focus content searches and identify only those resources needed for student mastery. Importantly, we have made the strategic decision to include copyrighted materials in our content aggregation process; while we host as much content as we can, we continue to link to copyright-protected materials with the hope that one day we will either obtain permission to host the resource permanently or replace it with an even better openly licensed version.
We believe that our structured aggregation technique addresses all four of the initially-stated problems, and that this solution offers salient benefits to many stakeholders in the OER space. First and foremost, it addresses the needs of students and teachers looking for content on the web by placing content in context and by performing the important validating/vetting function on their behalf. Students visiting saylor.org need not blindly weigh the relative value of two comparable pieces of content on, for example, mitosis; they will know that a professor has canvassed the web on his or her behalf and can trust the resource. They will also understand how a piece of content fits into an overall topical progression, as well as within a chosen course and its projected outcomes. Secondly, our process assists content developers and funders in the prudent use of resources when developing new OER content. Our model enables us to identify gaps in existing content, and avoid unnecessary reduplication. Third, our process, specifically our decision to include copyrighted content, promotes open practices and engages the academic community in the OER space. When we cannot find an openly resource, or when a copyrighted resource is deemed superior to an openly licensed variation, we reach out to the copyright holder to encourage the relicensing or sharing of content. Finally, we draw attention to the work of content providers who have previously remained relatively undiscovered.
We will share the Open Course Library project, including technical & professional development challenges faced as we developed phase 1.
The goal of the Open Course Library is for faculty to design digital, openly licensed materials for 81 high enrolling courses in Washington State community and technical colleges. During the development of the first 42 Open Course Library courses, faculty designed, piloted, and then revised their courses using the our system wide ANGEL LMS. We chose to use ANGEL as our primary development platform for because most of our faculty course designers were already familiar with that LMS. Using ANGEL also made sense because all faculty were required to pilot their OCL course, so initial development, piloting, and revisions could all be made with the same system.
In this presentation we will explain the workflow and roles of the Open Course Library staff. We will share some of the challenges we faced developing OER in an LMS. While new systems such as Canvas are removing many of the technical barriers to open sharing from an LMS, other challenges remain. Considerations for open content sharing include professional development for copyright and Creative Commons licensing, instructional design, and web accessibility.
Check out the latest OER from MITE: a complete Algebra 1 program, and also get a preview of upcoming Developmental Math releases.
The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE) has developed a comprehensive, multimedia-based Algebra 1 program, distributed openly via Hippocampus as well as through its membership-supported National Repository of Online Courses (NROC). The design and features of the Algebra 1 program were guided the input of a nationwide community of algebra administrators, instructors, and students. The Algebra 1 course takes the OER remix concept to a new level by capitalizing on the multiple levels of asset granularity that make up a high-end, media-rich program. This new remix approach can better serve the diverse needs of a broad population of users.
In this presentation, we will give an overview of the architecture of the Algebra 1 course as well as a preview of Developmental Math. We will also discuss the current status of MITE's sustainability strategy, as well as details about the new remix model that serves a wider audience and enables MITE to create and distribute high-quality OER in a sustained manner.
Learn how Washington's colleges went from a few system shared courses in 1997 to developing 81 courses as part of the Open Course Library.
Washington's State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) is currently developing the Open Course Library, an ambitious 2-year project to design open educational resources for 81 high enrolling courses. In 1997 SBCTC began developing a way to share courses with a "pooled enrollments" model. For over a decade, SBCTC's system shared courses have allowed smaller colleges to provide a variety of "long tail" course offerings through a well-organized system of online course sharing. In this presentation we will explain how our system shared courses paved the way to the Open Course Library, providing a culture of sharing as well as the technical framework to allow Washington State's colleges to engage more fully in the Open Education movement.
As part of its transition to the Common Core State Standards for math and English, the Jordan School District has aggregated and created an online collection of freely available and openly licensed materials. Teachers began using these materials in place of traditional textbooks this fall, and this presentation will describe the process and results to date of this innovative experiment.
Flat World Knowledge both gives away and sells open-source textbooks in a way they believe to be financially sustainable. Is it really?
Many college students and their families are concerned about the high costs of textbooks. A company called Flat World Knowledge both gives away and sells open-source textbooks in a way they believe to be financially sustainable. This article reports on the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open-source textbook model after one year of operation.
We will discuss newly released curriculum from the Open High School of Utah and its worldwide reach.
The UNESCO Chairs in OER explain their programme, goals and objectives in supporting an international network of OER users.
In Nov. 2006, ICDE launched its Global Task Force on OER at the UNESCO HQ in Paris with strong support from UNESCO. In March 2009 an OER Seminar was organised by the EADTU OER Task force and UNESCO, again at UNESCO HQ. It seemed a natural step for UNESCO to establish UNESCO OER Chairs, which were granted to Fred Mulder and Rory McGreal, both active in the OER community. The Canadian Chair is focusing on stimulating OER capacity building and awareness raising, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America and specifically with the world's Open Universities. The Dutch Chair embraces research to underpin and give guidance to the exploration, introduction, implementation and exploitation of OER in a variety of societies at the national level.
The aim of this Panel is to discuss the Activity plans of both Chairs and to amend them where necessary. This under explicit consideration of the continental and national differences and of the self-learning mode as a promising perspective in relation to OER.
Entering the eye of the $2B C3T OER storm: Lessons learned thus far, leveraging the services, planning for future public OER investments
In February 2011 the U.S. Department of Labor announced the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (C3T) grant program, which will make available up to $2 billion over the next four years for community colleges to develop educational and career training programs for displaced workers. An exciting condition of the funding is that all resources must be licensed under CC BY, making C3T the largest federal investment in OER to date in the United States.
Creative Commons worked quickly with its partners the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges to conceive and develop a set of infrastructure services and support for C3T grantees. Creative Commons has received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to lead this effort. The set of comprehensive services will lend technical support to grantees in meeting the open licensing requirement and ensure the interoperability of education and training materials. In addition, the services will guide grantees to adopt best practices for OER course design and technology, instill institutional knowledge and policies aligned with open licensing, and incorporate a robust evaluation component to track successful progress so that subsequent rounds of C3T funding continue with the important open licensing provision intact.
While the project has been underway for only 6 months (3 year timeline), we'll provide an update on the work of the consortium up to this point, including crucial lessons learned with regard to communications, community outreach, and open course design and creation. We'll preview the services being provided to the first wave of grantees, and discuss the vision and planned activities for future funding rounds, and for scaling open licensing to other federal programs more generally.
Report of a study on the learning gains and cost savings achieved when open textbooks replace traditional textbooks in high school science classrooms.
OERs can walk the walk, not just talk the talk! Integrating OERs into "old" education systems by building an OER publishing company in RSA.
Siyavula is a Shuttleworth Foundation seeded project that has developed a comprehensive set of K-9 OERs as well as the Free High School Science Texts Grade 10-12 Maths and Science textbooks, all of which are available on the Connexions platform. These resources have built on many other OER projects by integrating rich media OERs like the Khan Academy and PhET Simulations and more. In addition, an open-source, openly-licensed assessment bank has been developed to support these products and allow educators to quickly and easily share assessment items, set tests and analyse results. Much of this work has relied on volunteer contributions and to date Siyavula has been funded by sponsorship.
However, these products suffer from relatively poor uptake in an environment where IT-literacy is low and no processes exist for OERs to be officially adopted by schools or even for them to easily be recognised by the Department of Basic Education.
In order to rectify this and to ensure that volunteers contributions have the maximum impact; that schools can realise the benefits collaborative content development, remixing and reuse of content, cost savings associated with aggregated printing, increased technology integration; and that the Department of Basic Education realises the potential and cost-saving benefits of OERs we have turned Siyavula into an OER publishing company. A revenue model has been developed to make Siyavula sustainable.
Siyavula is now a registered publisher and is marketing OERs as traditional, proprietary resources are marketed, as well as submitting texts for the official government approved lists. This allows schools to use their official textbook budgets to buy them at a significantly reduced price over competitors products. In addition, Siyavula has rolled out a series training courses to enhance online collaboration around the development of resources, the awareness of OERs and potential opportunities for technology integration into the classroom. All workshops and courses are focused on openly-licensed products.
The details of developing the Siyavula business model of how to add effective value and interfacing with the official processes will be presented as well as the disconnects between the OER products and expectations based on proprietary products that do not feature rich media. In addition, the delicate balance of revenue generation coupled to volunteer contributions will be discussed.
The JVLA intends to capitalize on the shared mission, and pedagogy of Jesuit schools to build a collaborative community committed to OER.
The purpose of the Jesuit Virtual Learning Academy is to serve as a collaborative platform for the community of Jesuit secondary schools. We do this by providing innovations in the delivery of credit-bearing courses for students, professional development opportunities for faculty, and the provision of a technology platform that encourages communication and collaboration among our schools.
Noting the rich shared history, mission, and pedagogy of our Jesuit schools, the Ignatian Academy of Excellence is designed to be a common workspace and sharing platform for the network. It will be a place where trusted teachers can collaborate around core disciplines to share and vet course content, discuss teaching methods, share classroom activities, explore technology tools, and more. The three primary tools being deploying are Moodle for the development and delivery of courses and programs, Connexions/RHAPTOS which will serve as the JVLA's primary content repository, and Conenza, a community-building platform for connecting teachers and resources.
Go Forth and Teach, one of the foundational documents of Jesuit education, states, "In order to promote an awareness of "others," Jesuit education stresses community values such as equality of opportunity for all, the principles of distributive and social justice, and the attitude of mind that sees service of others as more self-fulfilling than success or prosperity." The OER movement provides a practical way for Jesuit schools to live out this call; and the Ignatian Academy of Excellence provides us the proper platform to 1) introduce and promote the use of open educational resources, 2) provide teacher training on the effective use and/or development of OER, 3) vet content to identify and share the best available resources, 4) share best practices, lesson plans and more regarding the use of OER, and 5) collaborate on the development of additional resources.
The current focus of the JVLA and the Ignatian Academy of Excellence is serving the network of North American schools. However, the OER movement provides us an opportunity to engage the larger network of over 400 Jesuit schools worldwide.
Open learning implies diverse learners. Design beyond wide access of previously local closed courses. Reconsider a book-logic design to address a global audience.
The First generation of open courses were often based on local courses, initially designed for a specific class and context and then modified somewhat to allow open access. Designs were still based on the personal preferences of an instructor and developed for a specific class. The lifting of access restrictions was a wonderful accomplishment. That was a significant step towards natively-born open courseware (OCW). As the concept of OCW matures, we face many serious challenges, including sustainability, maintaining content relevance, and designing natively for an open courseware (OCW) environment to meet the expectations of such courses.
This presentation focuses on the key considerations to design future OCW. It is the intentionality of the architecture that provides the desired long-term affordances to ably meet the objectives. From a holistic perspective we all seek exceptional instructional value, relevance and longevity of the offerings, and sustainability beyond the initial phases and beyond a local context and following. These issues will be guided by the following questions in the presentation:
? How can the design accommodate learners with diverse skill levels?
? How can different learning objectives be satisfied?
? How can the learning be rewarding for thousands of concurrent learners?
? How can the learning community be formed and maintained?
? How does the design influence the sustainability of the whole project?
Openlanguages.net has been in development since 2004. In addition to addressing the needs of many diverse casual learners, the site is the prescribed learning environment of college courses and supports the learning of home schoolers and college students on two continents. These needs lead to a modular design, allowing many curricula to be based on the same expanding content infrastructure.
Open Courseware (OCW) still suffers from disjointed development efforts with a lack of collective strategies to exploit explicit goals to benefit the international community. Layers of structures have to be developed to harness information and development of courses and resources. It is now time to consider future designs to employ Internet-based and Web-based solutions to deliver content and communication to the wide array of mobile and stationary platforms with ubiquitous access. It is the right time to design natively open courseware. It is a new generation of design and development to built upon the unrelenting efforts of unwavering pioneers.
If I beat you in chess, you know that I can play. Does good learning design create evidence, which can replace credentials?
One of the most interesting topics in the open education movement focuses on certification and credentialing of learning achievements by participants in open learning environments. The underlying assumption is that we need some form of certification, to validate what we have learned. In this session, I would like to to suggest (slightly tongue-in-cheek) that if we can re-imagine learning as a process that is authentic, social, and open - we might not require a separate certification process. Achievements can be evident in the learning itself.
== Does learning require certification? ==
Certification is a signal or currency, that lets us transfer achievements to those outside of our learning community. As a student, I don't need grades to signal my skills to those I studied with - but to those who don't know me, my abilities, or my achievements.
== If I beat you in chess, you know that I can play ==
Jim Gee calls testing "primitive" and the result of poor learning design, and compares students to game players. There is no need for testing in games, because each stage of the game requires some form of mastery and achievement before the player can enter.
== Does good learning create evidence, which can replace credentials? ==
If we follow Gee, we must ask if the problem with credentials is not rooted in the design of learning environments and experience. Can we borrow lessons from game design to make learning so authentic, engaging, and social that it produces all necessary evidence of achievements as a byproduct of the learning? (Or the other way around, does the learning become a byproduct of achievements?)
An update of sustainability practices adopted by ARIS and it's growing community of mobile users. See arisgames.org
In 2010, over half of the world's population payed for a mobile phone subscription, and developing countries increased their share of mobile subscriptions from 53% to 73% in only five years (International Telecommunication Union, 2010). This increasing global permeation of mobile technologies suggest that fundamentally new forms of learning are within reach. An impending need exists to explore this medium's unique learning affordances, such as enabling users to remediate their experience of place (Gagnon, 2010; Mathews & Squire, 2009; Squire, 2006).
To explore this affordance of remediation, a mobile open source experiment - ARIS - was created. This authoring tool helps non-programmers design location-based, augmented experiences for learning, playable on smartphones. Storytellers, game designers, activists, museum designers, folklorists and educators have experimented with ARIS to create activities for informal and formal learning environments.
In tandem with the open education movement (Wiley & Gurell, 2009), the ARIS online editor, phone client, and code were made freely available online for reuse, redistribution and revision (Hilton et al., 2010). Openness is provided by an MIT software license in a basic permission sense. Yet, since ARIS is not an alternative to established software (i.e. Microsoft Word), openness ends up being more about how to organize and enable several groups of people as explorers of mobile media with ARIS.
ARIS was shared early on for open experimentation as the team continued to iterate. Regular feedback from users informed and prioritized development. Over four years, a global community has emerged. At the three-day 2011 ARIS Global Game Jam, over one hundred participants, living in four countries and eleven states, created one hundred and twenty-seven games and prototypes.
In this session members of our research group will share lessons learned through ARIS. We will discuss how (1) a usable prototyping tool is central to growing community, (2) production-driven events boost product quality and community achievement, (3) financial support is possible through a hybrid sustainability model (endowment/institutional/partnership-exchange)(Downes, 2007), and lastly, that (4) early, open sharing of a tool attracts long-term, contributing peers. Next steps will also be shared, including potential partnerships, institutional adoption, and development models, to ultimately improve understanding of mobile as a medium for learning.
Come see what is new with eduCommons. This presentation covers case studies, features, additional functionality as well as future plans.
It has never been a better time to think about using eduCommons for your OER platform. In the early days of eduCommons, design decisions were taken to narrow the scope of eduCommons and focus on integration points with other tools and platforms, instead of building a single entire monolithic platform that tries to do everything. This strategy is now paying off, with a number of partners now integrating third party functionality directly into eduCommons. With features to scale at all performance levels, and functionality to make creating and publishing OER materials even easier. Find out about best practices for handling metadata, accessibility, semantic web features, discoverability, and copyright management, and how eduCommons makes all this easy. Find what others are doing with eduCommons, and what is possible with the latest code base. Participate in a discussion about eduCommons future, as well as find out what the latest road maps are.
Whether you are building your own OER repository or participating in more formal programs like OpenCourseWare, eduCommons can provide you with a solid, mature platform, with multiple integration points to many other educational platforms currently in use. Find out how you can build your own OER site and get the support you need to maintain and grow it.
Badging: how rewarding the little things can add up to big things in open education production and advocacy.
Most existing open educational resources cannot easily be used as building blocks for new courses
Revise/Remix can build a 1000 points of OER light. Can these lights converge to fire authentic learning analytics & share-alike data models?
Conventional wisdom in the OER community maintains that one of the more important features of the open education approach is the malleability and customizability of materials, allowing freely available component resources to be remixed, adapted and modified to suit specific institutional directives, student needs or faculty interests. These features are important enough that the ability to revise and remix content is a core part of the commonly accepted 4R framework that defines open content. While the ability to tailor OER to meet changing or specific needs is one compelling part of the open model, the infinity variety that this encourages creates serious obstacles for another expected benefit of openness: using learning analytics to drive adaptive teaching and learning, support iterative improvement, and demonstrate effectiveness.
The ability to deliver meaningful learning analytics has been one promise of the open education approach. A use-driven design process for OER depends on the resources being used by a large number of students with varied background knowledge, relevant skills and future goals—a student population that open and well-used resources should be able to provide. Such a process can use such interaction data to iteratively improve courses in a meaningful and empirical way. Beyond improvement analytics, this same data can be used mid-stream to improve the effectiveness of learners and instructors.
Despite this promise, the OER community has not been able to create or take advantage of widespread, generally applicable learning analytics tools. While some organizations have had success in developing analytics platforms and approaches, such successes have tended to focus on specific resources, often developed with data collection in mind and not always falling at the “most open” end of the open content continuum. One barrier to more widespread analytic tools has been the variety of OER afforded by remixing and revising.
This presentation will explore the benefits and trade-offs to be made between adaptability and analytics. In the course of this exploration, we will argue that the benefits to be had from an approach that places a higher priority on analytics may outweigh those to be gained from endless variety in the OER space. Similarly, we will discuss some approaches to better harness open education’s promised ability to drive learning analytics, with greater and lesser compromises to the adaptability of OER. We will propose open communities of use and evaluation coalesced around individual OERs using learning analytics to improve the resource through coordinated revision and remix. Open education has embraced share alike licenses for materials. The next logical step is the open exchange of learning data and evidence of effectiveness, to “share alike and share data”. We will also suggest approaches to integrating disparate analytics-enabled OER into common platforms and the development of OER to published standards for learning analytic data.
Learners accessing OER can acquire knowledge formally or informally. This project reports on assessment and accreditation policies worldwide.
A major function of colleges and universities is to validate and credentialise learning by conferring qualifications and degrees. They are well equipped and experienced in the process of assessing the quality of learning for formal academic or professional credit. However, digital media are transforming the ways individuals create, share and learn both formally and informally from content and applications available on the web. There is considerable ambiguity regarding the validity of this type of learning or self-study online and the use of individualized learning paths. The problem is that learners who access OER on the Web and do acquire knowledge and skills either formally or informally, alone or in groups, cannot readily have their learning assessed and subsequently receive appropriate academic recognition for their efforts. So, there is a need for ongoing research in order to understand the different ways that institutions are addressing the needs of this growing learner population.
This paper will report on a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research project. The project is original in that it will research existing and nascent international protocols and practices leading to formal academic credit for non-traditional learners. This provides a framework to evaluate the transferability and applicability of these means for assessing OER learning on the web leading to formal credentials. Existing organisational and policy barriers will be identified and categorized. The project proposes a conceptual framework to overcome these barriers for widening access to post-secondary education through digital learning in ways, which are more accessible cost-effective and responsive to the diverse, changing needs of the knowledge economy and society.
This research is significant because the core mission of any modern university is to contribute to society. Many universities incorporate the mission of community service, as publicly funded institutions, to serve the wider interests of society by sharing expertise and scholarship. An understanding of how different institutions are approaching the recognition of non-formal and informal digital learning can provide change agents with new knowledge on how to expand their community service and learning missions by creating flexible pathways to credentialise learning for non-traditional students.
Recent transformational advances in digital media, the web and mobile devices have changed the learning landscape, ensuring that this research project is different. The exponential increase in accessibility to quality educational as OER provides unprecedented opportunities for learning. Thousands of course modules are presently available online, as OER from respected institutions, along with millions of websites that can be used to support a wide variety of learning objectives. This exponential growth has opened up opportunities for learners leading to potential obligations from our institutions.
The UNESCO/COL Chair has partners on all continents. This project will contribute to the advancement of knowledge of the assessment of learning experience for non-traditional learners. The outputs of this research could potentially have wide social impact in expanding access to learning opportunities for those students currently under-served by the formal sector while enhancing the efficiency of taxpayer funded institutions by refining existing mechanisms for assessment and accreditation or non-traditional learners.
Neeru Khosla will share how interactive, personalized digital learning tools are helping to bridge the achievement gap in inner-city schools.
Free digital textbook provider CK-12 Foundation and Leadership Public Schools (LPS), a network of charter high schools in California?s Bay Area, collaborated to create customized College Access Readers featuring embedded literacy supports to help bridge the academic gap for an urban student population whose majority enter 9th grade reading between 2nd and 6th grade levels with math skills at the same level. LPS Richmond is using the Algebra College Access Reader and FlexMath, an online Algebra support and numeracy remediation approach developed by LPS in conjunction with CK-12. Richmond has also integrated immediate-response data with clickers. Recent semester exams showed 92% at or above grade level, triple their performance last year and four times that of neighboring schools, a turnaround the result of a rapid-cycle development process made possible by technology.
Exploring how we in the OER community can improve the relationship between user experience and instructional design.
As internet technologies evolve, the web environment continues to offer instructional designers and teaching faculty new opportunities, challenges and insights regarding the delivery of learning materials to students. For example, often the notion of "delivery" is shifting to "interaction" in a variety of important ways. What can we learn from the field of user experience that should inform our learning design process? Although it has long been known that integrating user experience with software development processes can be a tricky proposition, the notion of applying that expertise to the course design process is relatively uncharted territory. What from the learning sciences and design principles should not be compromised for improved user experience? Is there really a tradeoff or is that notion artificial? Most importantly, what kinds of processes can designers use to keep learning environments relevant as technology continues to change?
This session will explore how the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University works through these issues and will describe the process we developed to incorporate the perspectives of both user experience with learning science into the course design process. The OLI is an open educational resources project that began in 2002 with a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The project is also supported by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Lumina Foundation and The Kresge Foundation. OLI was recently awarded additional funding from the Gates Foundation in conjunction with Creative Commons and the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) in part to foster a greater collaboration user experience specialists and course designers.
The presenters will share some of the challenges that they had along the way and what is being done to surmount them. They also share lessons learned and successes that forward our understanding of how these perspectives can integrate in practice and why we believe it is vitally important to students that we do so. In part, the solution is to realize the gains to be made by utilizing input from both domains of expertise, and to re-frame the notion that user experience and instructional design are at odds with one another, rather that they both are interested in improving outcomes. Lastly, the presenters discuss their ongoing work to iteratively improve both our understanding of best practices from the instructional design and user experience fields and the processes by which we combine both fields as we strive to improve course design.
Atomic Studio is a free 3D atom modeler that utilizes the Wikimedia Commons API to populate the interactive application with up-to-date, community-provided media.
Atomic Studio was created as a design-based experiment for supporting the creation of complex open educational resources. It is built in Unity 3D and is provided as a free, web-based resource for students and teachers to support learning surrounding the periodic table. By using the tool, users can select an element from the periodic table, view an interactive 3D model of the element at the atomic level, and browse a gallery of images to gain an understanding of what the element looks like in real life.
In the currently developing participatory age, we have come to see the need to channel what Shirky (2010) calls a ''cognitive surplus'' or the result of our ''fusing ... means, motive, and opportunity'' out of the raw material of accumulated free time'' (ch. 7), which culminates in the development of potentially incredible products developed by the masses (e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.). However, the glaring limitation of such participatory endeavors, at least as they currently stand, is that they rarely take form in any positive way and, rather, reflect what happens when "ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule" (Keen, 2008, p. 9). Due to their organic nature and the extremely simplified structures of the connective technologies they utilize, online participatory endeavors typically do not foster the development of complicated, high-quality products, like effective educational media. In the case of open educational resources, then, there is a need to understand how to weld diverse expertise together into a medium that supports effective, contextual learning for all.
Unlike traditional educational software development projects, which rely upon careful, planned collaboration between subject matter experts, designers, and developers, this project's goal was to create an interactive application that is dynamically updated by unintentional community contributions. In other words, the final application was intended to serve as a shell for channeling collective intelligence of the masses toward very small, specific educational purposes. By using the Wikimedia Commons API, Atomic Studio is able to dynamically feed images and illustrations directly from community-maintained resources into the 3D interactive application, representing them in a medium that is suitable for teaching and learning in a more contextualized and engaging manner. By harvesting undirected community resources (that by themselves might be educationally negligible), Atomic Studio gives us a glimpse into what can happen when the design and development of educational applications are driven by a desire to direct a cognitive surplus toward achieving the goals of open education reform.
Assessing the thorny and complex problem of quality in online educational resources in a cost effective manner is a critical issue for digital libraries. In a world of increasing peer produced content, where it is often used for educational purposes, determining the quality and usefulness of this content is also important. Acknowledging that quality is contextual and resources differ greatly in terms of writing, presentation, and target audience, there are still certain characteristics that distinguish high quality resources.
The Open Educational Resources Assessment (OPERA) is a machine learning algorithm that was developed to assess the quality of online resources in the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE) to support faster discovery and evaluation of resources, especially for K12 teachers. Teachers often point out that finding and evaluating resources takes a large amount of their lesson planning time. OPERA includes over 60 indicators in 6 categories and 24 subcategories to define quality. An evaluation of the initial algorithm was conducted on expert vetted DLESE resources with positive results. Using an updated version of the algorithm, projects in the Instructional Architect (IA.usu.edu) created by K12 math and sciences teachers, were assessed and compared to expert human ratings. Results from the latest iteration of the algorithm are promising.
This session will exhibit details on the categories and indicators with results from some of the work noted above, specifically addressing the value of OPERA in assisting teacher’s selection and evaluation of resources. Additionally it will provide an opportunity for participants to weigh in on the nature and refinement of the quality categories and indicators, the relevance and potential influence of OPERA for open content, and interact with resources tagged by OPERA. Participants will learn how algorithms like OPERA can be useful in instructional settings.
An open instructional model is greatly enhanced by a free-wheeling, intensely engaging live audio environment.
As part of Jim Groom's Massive Open Online Course on Digital Storytelling (http://ds106.us), a freeform web "radio station" was founded and continues to evolve both independently and interdependently of the course community. The audio environment has served exceptionally well to support course activities: weekly lectures are streamed live, student audio projects are served up, and there are even live call-in sessions in which students are invited to offer feedback on how the course is proceeding. It has been a platform for other educational activities outside of #DS106, such as the Connectivism and Connected Learning MOOC offered by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, or live-streaming from conferences that members of the world-wide #DS106 community happen to be attending.
The 'extra-curricular' activities have been arguably of greater interest, as a community of educators pushes the limits of the medium to see what is possible. So far, #DS106 Radio has webcast online stories, live global discussions, and synchronized multi-point guitar jams. Participants have programmed serious and polished audio documentaries (including some live from Japan in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 earthquake), as well as hosted truly horrendous online karaoke parties. Music shared by participants provides the ambient backdrop, whether programmed asynchronously by an anonymous online 'drop box', or live when a DJ 'seizes the feed'.
The results have been wild, unpredictable, uneven, exciting, occasionally unlistenable and often great fun. The medium has proven to be a remarkably intimate form of interaction and has promoted a spirit of experimentation, demonstrating how technology can deepen engagement across a community.
Additional Info for Planning: Ideally this would be two sessions, preferably on separate days.
The first half of the session would explore the dynamics of the DS106 MOOC, and discuss how the web radio station developed. Archived clips of some of the more memorable moments would be shared at this session. Discussion on strategies to encourage engagement, as well as potential pitfalls, will be encouraged.
The second part of the session would be a more technically focused, hands-on workshop. In this session we will go into more detail about how the station is set up, and how to broadcast live web audio. Specific exercises will focus on how to transmit various types of live and recorded pieces from laptops and mobile devices. Hopefully these activities will be extended beyond the physical confines of the workshop space.
It is also anticipated that #DS106 Radio will be a platform for the Open Education Conference itself, perhaps by streaming some sessions, as well as short live interviews with participants and bystanders. It is hoped that attendees at Open Ed 2011 will join as co-programmers via the many means of participation.
We built a video assessment tool and want to share it w/ anyone who finds it useful. We want to demo it and engage what it means to be open.
The Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool (VOCAT) is a web-based teaching tool and assessment instrument developed by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College. Built on an open source platform, VOCAT is a flexible, extensible, and potentially infinitely scalable web application designed to facilitate meaningful performance assessment and the collection and analysis of evaluation data in a wide range of instructional contexts.
VOCAT provides assessors a means of assigning numerical scores in response to any number of pre-defined criteria and of giving qualitative feedback (written or audio) in response to videos recorded live or uploaded to a server. It likewise enables those assessed to review videos of their performance and to respond to feedback received. It aggregates presentations and feedback for each user and offers an informative picture of progress over any period of time. Data collected within the tool can be exported for use in statistical analysis and predictive analytics programs.
Since 2007, we at Baruch College have used VOCAT with great success to teach and assess public speaking in several courses across our entire curriculum, from Speech and Theater to Accounting and Business Policy. It also has been used to collect data for our business school's program assessment. To date, approximately 8,000 of our students have used VOCAT in 24 distinct classes (407 sections total.) We are now moving toward sharing VOCAT with others thanks to two fairly recent developments:
1) The Middle States Commission on Higher Education?s site visit team to Baruch College recognized the promise in VOCAT for face-to-face and online instruction and noted that VOCAT ?should be celebrated as a national model for higher education.? 2) The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article on VOCAT that focused on future possible uses of the tool in all manner of instruction (http://is.gd/dPMvTR)
With more and more institutions reaching out to us to inquire about VOCAT, we are starting to make sense of what it means to share the tool and to work toward building an active, vibrant community of developers and users. This open science fair session will offer a demonstration of VOCAT, an in-depth discussion of its development and various technical details. It will likewise engage the audience in a discussion of possible future uses, new functionality essential for wide scale sharing and adoption, and the various practical considerations and broader implications of sharing the tool with other institutions, something that we have only just now begun to think about. The goal for us, is, on the one hand, to generate interest in VOCAT, but, on the other, to learn from the audience about what it would mean for the tool to be open and available to all who wish to use it.
What claims the OER movement can confidently make?How can we share the evidence for those claims?Let?s try by growing an OER Claims? Garden
- What are the main claims that the Open Education community can confidently make after the first decade of research and practice has concluded?
- And what is the evidence for those claim?
To answer these questions we need a collective effort. We need answers that are built together by sharing, knowledge resources, stories and insights on Open Education research and practice. We need collective intelligence in action.
To cater for this in this session we propose to run a workshop in which participants will be involved in growing what we call an "OER Claims' Garden".
The Claims Garden is a garden in which each flower represent a claim the OER movement can make (or wish to make in the future) about OER research and practice (i.e. OER delivers equal or better quality resources at a lower cost). Flowers can have both green and red petals. Green petals represent arguments in favour and red petals arguments against a certain claim. Finally flowers' leafs represent the OER themes associated to the claim the flower represents (i.e. advocacy, access, etc)
Participants will be asked to populate the Claim's Garden by adding new claims (creating new flowers) or adding evidences and themes (petals and leafs to already existing flowers).
To do so participants will work with boards and cards. There will be four main types of cards: rounded flower bulb (for claims), green and red petals (for arguments in favour and against), and green leafs (for OER themes).
As a result the "Claims' Garden" will provide a picture of some of the claims for the OER field. Visual hints will attract and focus participants' attention on: i.e mature claims (flowers with many petals), contested claims (flowers with many greens and red petals), well supported claims (flowers with many green petals and no red petals) etc.
Moreover by using the flower metaphor, participants can collaboratively investigate the arguments subtending a claim, evaluate their soundness (are the arguments well backed up?) and explore their popularity (i.e a claim with many red petals is likely to support an unpopular position within the OER landscape).
Within the workshop we will also present the Beta version of the CI-OLnet webtool (available at ci.olnet.org).
CI-OLnet is the Web tool though which results of the f2f "Claims' Garden" exercise can be shared online and can be further integrated with other claims, evidences and resources that have been added by online users who already contributed to the website.
CI-OLnet aims to provide an environment to systematically interrogate the Open Education movement and ultimately will build an evidence hub which represents and maps the collective knowledge of the Open Education community.
The "Claims' Garden" workshop method has been previously tested for the first time at the OER11 conference. In order to further promote participation to the CI-OLnet Evidence Hub we propose to run a second workshop at Open-Ed11.
This work is developed within the Open Learning Network (OLnet) project, sponsored by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation from the US.
Demo of a free and open source development environment that runs in the browser, for creating your own interactive educational software.
Motivation: One common finding of several educational reform efforts (such as NCAT and OLI) is the value of using interactive software to make K-12 and college courses more effective, engaging, and efficient. Examples of such software include simulations, games, and animations. The space of education, however, with its thousands of topics and standards to cover, is too large for the reform models used by NCAT and OLI to scale. OLI requires many thousands of dollars to develop each course, and NCAT depends on existing commercial and proprietary software for its courses and thus primarily focuses on freshman large-enrollment courses. The ability to create and customize one's own interactive educational software is beyond the reach of most teachers, who primarily stick to text-based notes, powerpoint presentations, and videorecordings as seen in most opencourseware repositories. Creating interactive educational software is growing even more complex in the meantime, and computing platforms are rapidly evolving to include new mobile and tablet devices which are rendering much existing educational software obsolete or inaccessible to their users (such as Java applets or Flash animations or Windows or Mac OS desktop applications).
HTML5: Fortunately, a software development platform is emerging that is free and open and works on virtually all computing devices, desktop, mobile, and tablet: HTML5 and JavaScript. In essence, the web browser is the platform. However, developing interactive software on this platform is still too difficult or time-consuming for the ordinary end-user, teacher, student, or hobbyist developer, due to various factors such as the lack of supporting developer tools, the inherent complexities of HTML5 and Javascript syntax and libraries, the requirement to purchase space to host applications on the web.
Educode: Several alternative and more user-friendly programming languages and developer tools are starting to be built on top of JavaScript and HTML5, including tools that allow all development to happen completely within a web browser. Educode, being demoed in this open science fair, is one such example. Educode is a free and open source programming and development environment designed with teachers and other non-professional programmers in mind. It is built on top of the HTML5 platform, and all development occurs in the web browser. The development, design, and initial pilot tests of this tool will be discussed during the session.
Demonstration of new software applications for creation and application of open rubrics.
The application of rubrics
offers consistency in evaluation, clear requirements for participants, and precision regarding what objectives are being met.
Attendees to this session will learn how rubrics are used to evaluate their participants? performance, how to leverage their use to increase learning, and how to report measures of success using an open source tool developed to build, share, and use
rubrics.
OER Glue and CaPReT make web remix for learning sexy.
Whether they are putting together a lesson plan, or assembling materials for self-study, our tools enable users to work the way they want to work. OER Glue delivers authentic learning experiences by letting users drag and drop text snippets, images, videos, flash, or just about anything from any website to create their own mashups. CaPReT makes tracking OER reuse simple. See some OER text you want to use as part of a lesson? Simply cut and paste the text and get attribution and license information automagically. The promise of the OER has been the ability to "remix the web", with these tools that promise has become reality. Come see WTF is going on.
OER player for your Ipad to integrate it in your PLE
SCORM PLAYER FOR IPAD
We'll present an autonomous player for IOS (Apple Ipad) specially built for SCORM packages produced with eXelearning authoring software and also IMS and other educational packages provided by open course sites like MIT-OCW or Educommons.
The player will allow to discover, to downloading and to execute the educational package without other limitations than the hardware limitations of the mobile device.
There is an increasing number of open educational resources (OER) for teachers and students around the world that are downloadable for reusing directly or adapted for specific purposes. But the use of those OER's is often limited by technical questions, especially format issues. In such cases, reusability is an unsolved question, more a desire than a fact.
Normalized ways to package educational resources, like SCORM o IMSCP have tried to solve this problem. They produce files that are readable and executable if the right player for them is available. That is the case of many Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Moodle, Web CT, Blackboard, etc.
But the problem persists if you want to create an Open Information System in order to be accessed by the student's Personal Learning Environment. (PLE)
There is a few stand-alone SCORM players, but they are only used for validation or testing due to the complexity of their use.
Also, as a SCORM alternative, a number of those OER's are built in the way of other recognizable formats like the ones from OCW-MIT or Educommons platform, but again the execution of those packages is limited.
However, the increasing use of Personal Learning Environments makes us believe that it is necessary to make it possible to use and to execute the educational package when and where the learner desires. Therefore, PLE should be extended far from the screen or virtual desk in the computer to the devices that the student uses in his regular activity, such as cell phones, tablets, ebook readers, etc..
Mobile devices and specifically digital tablets like Apple Ipad and similar are part of those new learning spaces. Our proposal tries to integrate them as elements of the PLE that students build to achieve their educational goals.
In our proposal, we have created a library of Open Educational Objects which have been built with eXeLearning authoring software (SCORM objects) and an Ipad app to access to the library, to download them and to execute them off-line.
View open resources for math used at Scottsdale CC including txtbks, lessons, examples, hwrk. Discuss how similar items can be adapted for your own courses.
In a time when more students are attending college, costs of attending college are rising, and an economy is trying to recover from a recession, as educators we need to look to cost effective resources for our students. For many years we have been bound to publishers for materials, content, and homework assignments and during this time publishers have made a fortune while college students are having money taken from their pockets. In today's age we have the ability to move away from the publishers and use materials that not only will save our students money, but also offer us as educators more flexibility to mold courses to fit our own pedagogical styles.
We have begun making this transition at Scottsdale Community College. We plan to have on display several of the open resources we have began employing. These resources vary from an open text book created by authors from another school, to an online assessment system created by another educator that we have adapted to fit our own courses, to worked out examples created by our own faculty that can be viewed via the internet by all students, to online lessons that accompany the textbooks that students can use all free of charge.
We would like to demonstrate how we have created resources to accompany the open College Algebra text offered by Stitz and Ziegler in order to create a free learning environment for our students that caters to multiple learning styles. This includes online lessons created by SCC faculty using Softchalk Lessonbuilder (www.softchalk.com) that go along with the book that allow students to interact with the lessons online. Also, to help students see how particular problems are solved, LiveScribe (www.livescribe.com) lessons are used so students can have free access anytime anywhere to worked out examples.
In addition to these materials, we have also adapted the Washington Mathematics Assessment and Placement (WAMAP) resources created by David Lippman to fit several of our own courses (and continue to align it with our remaining courses). This resource allows us to give online homework assignments to our students and does not carry the fee that the online homework systems created by publishers do. We have found its functionality to rival, and in some cases exceed that of the publishers so we lose no advantage while we shed the costs to our students.
We see this Open Science Fair as an opportunity for us at SCC to share what we are doing with other educators interested in employing these types of open resources. This presentation will also present us with an opportunity to gain feedback to see how we can improve these resources or combine them with other resources out there at no additional cost to our students.
A demonstration of learning objects created at AU in 2011 using open coding for easy reuse and adaptation in other disciplines.
Athabasca University produced 25 multimedia learning objects for 17 high-enrolment online courses in 2010-2011. Since the pedagogical focus was on supporting student learning of particularly difficult concepts in such subjects as calculus, biology, music, human resources management, finance and accounting, the enhancements were designed to engage students in content through interactivity. The overall goal of the project was to develop open, reusable resources that could be released as OERs and that could be easily adapted to other courses, disciplines and contexts. Part of a larger project in open course development, the applications were designed to allow content to be replaced without reprogramming. We aim to build tools that will allow subject matter experts to create their own learning objects without deep technical expertise.
Teams of designers, programmers and professors built the learning resources using a collaborative and iterative development process. Special one-time funding supported the hiring of staff who were able to focus exclusively on these enhancements. Formative evaluations of the learning objects are underway, and demonstrations for faculty have created interest for adaptation of the original resources in other courses as well.
We will demonstrate a selection of the learning objects and illustrate the ease with which reuse can be arranged.
Project Kaleidoscope uses OER and embedded analytics to improve learning for at-risk students at 8 colleges. Pls share your expertise w/us.
Project Kaleidoscope brings together faculty and academic leaders from eight colleges to design open general education courses. Rather than developing new OER, the project instead invests to identify the best of the existing stock and use a closed-loop assessment process to adapt and improve the learning outcomes from the course designs.
The project goal is to better serve the needs of at-risk students in the US. Collectively, the Kaleidoscope partners serve more than 100,000 students annually, 69 percent of which are at risk.
Our poster presentation will provide an overview of the project and the course design approach. We hope to have the full cross-institutional faculty teams at the conference. These teams have created the course designs and will be in the process of delivering the courses. Faculty teams hope to share their experiences and learn from the expertise of OpenEd participants.
10,000 Solutions provides an ecosystem for actionable ideas to germinate that positively impact local and global communities.
Arizona State University (ASU) is a New American University, which means the institution measures itself by who it includes, not who it excludes, while committing itself to excellence, access and impact. Within the last few years, ASU launched "The Challenges Before Us" Campaign, highlighting eight broad but essential questions the university aims to solve. These include questions such as:
? How do we educate in a rapidly changing world?
? How do we focus information and technology to produce meaningful change?
? How do we build strong, vibrant communities?
? How do we create a sustainable way of life?
? How do we promote economic opportunity and security?
? How do we lead healthier, more fulfilling lives?
? How do we defend and extend human rights?
? How do we understand the past and present for the sake of the future?
To truly address these questions, ASU recognizes the need for input and support from many individuals; enter, 10,000 Solutions. Based on 60 second or less video uploads and text based actionable ideas, 10,000 Solutions aims to include ASU students, staff, faculty, alumni and community members in working to solve the eight challenge areas in an open innovation environment. By sharing their actionable ideas, entrants have the opportunity to gain feedback and support to move their solution forward.
The platform also allows communities of innovators to connect with one another, no matter their location. Entrants post their ideas based on the challenge area they are addressing so people can connect about topics that ignite them personally or collectively. Users can also comment on solutions to provide feedback. Similarly, groups can "tag" their idea with words or a group with whom they affiliate to further designate and gather their ideas.
Judging also provides an opportunity for feedback and interaction. The community can indicate their support for different ideas, which enables the entrant to move into the next round with their solution. Additional judging rounds will take place to engage a broader community and also continue to provide feedback on ideas. Curators will highlight their favorite entries in the collection and individuals assisting in running 10,000 Solutions can also underscore outstanding solutions. After experiencing the judging process, winners will gain opportunities to move their ideas forward. This includes funding or building relationships that will enhance the likeliness of the success of their solutions. To make their entry a reality, winners can turn to supporters of their actionable idea throughout the lifecycle of 10,000 Solutions.
The uniqueness of 10,000 Solutions rests in the combination of it inclusive nature to seek input from all constituencies while driving to confront key challenge areas, all within a university environment. By providing an arena where individuals can gain feedback but also the opportunity to move their ideas forward, 10,000 Solutions aims to redefine the role a university takes in society to not only educate students and support innovation, but actually empower individuals and groups to discuss and implement change on a greater scale.
The OCW Consortium has created a prototype of a Global Course Catalog. Get the latest updates on our progress.
In our continuing effort to increase the discoverability of OCW materials, as well as making OCW more useful to learners and educators, the OCW Consortium has created an initial prototype of a Global Course Catalog. Find out how it was created, what it does, and how you can help.
Find out more about eduCommons, see the latest version in action.
eduCommons is a platform for publishing both OER and OCW materials. If you are currently using eduCommons and have burning questions, or if you are thinking about using eduCommons, stop by and check out the latest version. We will be available to give live demos of the software, as well as show the latest features in the next release. Get hands on experience on how to quickly build and publish content. See how it can be used to match the needs of your OER or OpenCourseWare project. Find out how others are using eduCommons and see in person how we are integrating eduCommons with other social learning platforms and teaching environments.
Many instructors are walking away from established learning management systems in favor of open source platforms like Moodle and Sakai.
Background
A main concern among instructors teaching online courses is how to handle the presentation of course content and the management of students. A common solution is for instructors to adopt a learning management system (LMS). A problem is that many LMSs are not intuitive to the instructors nor the students and the learning curve of the LMS can get in the way of the actual course content. Furthermore, instructors can feel bound by limitations of the LMS and feel the need to alter their courses to fit the system. This is an unnecessary constraint to learning.
The key, then, is to locate an LMS that is simple and intuitive, yet robust and dynamic to be able to successfully handle the online course. Institutions have attempted for over a decade to addresses these concerns.
Facebook, on the other hand, is already used by a majority of students. They are familiar with it and are usually excited about using it to handle a course. It is where most of their network already is, including classmates and instructors. College students feel they can begin building their professional relationships, while at the same time doing course work in Facebook. This feels practical and innovative to them. Communicating with the instructor and classmates is streamlined and seamless as emails, inbox messages, and wall postings are all used within the Facebook LMS.
Many instructors are also familiar with Facebook, though they may not realize its abilities to serve as an LMS. With some simple understandings and manipulations, while incorporating some outside software and hardware applications, Facebook can become a powerful, easy-to-use LMS.
Activity
This session will feature a demonstration of ten college courses which the presenter has taught over the last year, using Facebook to handle the online course content and management. Students were provided the syllabus and the course calendar in Facebook. They were also divided into teams to work on specific projects. Their main source of contact and communication was Facebook. Assignments and course readings were managed through Facebook as well.
The presenter will share where Facebook was strong and weak when being used as an LMS. The instructor will also share data collected from the experience, including students' attitudes, perceptions, excitements, and concerns with the process.
A discussion on how to employ open educational resources and open licenses will be included.
The presenter will address issues such as how FERPA concerns were handled, specifically with the grading of assignments. A larger discussion of privacy concerns, including how to handle online class environments with students who are minors, will be included. The integration of other social media aspects, such as using blogs for assignments, will also be addressed. The instructor used the Livescribe audio recording smartpen to document class sessions and integrate them into the online class environment. This process will be demonstrated and discussed. There will be time to discuss attendees' questions and scenarios for their specific courses.
OER is based on open licensing. What happens when educators don't understand the licensing system? What is the impact of changes to copyright on OER?
There is a strong likelihood that by the time of the conference amendments to Canada's Copyright Act will have been made that include education under fair dealing. In my recent experience talking about copyright with educators and educational technologists in British Columbia I am struck by how little understood licensing systems are by the very people who use them. I'd like to explore this subject as part of the science fair given the experience of so many within the Open Education community.
The Internet, increasingly affordable computing, open licensing, open access journals and open educational resources provide the foundation for a world in which a quality education can be a basic human right. Yet before we break the "iron triangle" of access, cost and quality with new models, we need to educate policy makers about the obviousness of open policy: public access to publicly funded resources.
Do users want more content in their OER or in the Commons? Does fair use help or hinder OERs? Whom do we serve: the user or the instructor?
As producers of OERs, and OpenCourseWare in particular, we exist in a space of tension: what best represents the instructor's content (and intent) and what best serves the user? Copyright restrictions increase this tension by limiting what we are able to reproduce. Image removed due to copyright restrictions can frustrate the user at best, and diminish the quality of the resource worst. Exceptions and limitations to copyright, such as fair use in the U.S., only take us so far. Should we be producing a more complete resource, restrictions and all? Or do we better serve the user ? and the OER movement by licensing as much content into the Commons as we can? This is a chance to discuss what the balance between these two priorities should and can be.
Learn how mentoring, news literacy, OER videos and a collaborative online space is transforming how students think about current events.
Democratic Scholarly Networks: Knowledge, wealth, power, ability, scholarly tribes, and the romance of the public domain.
An assumption of the open scholarship movement is that by participating in online networks, scholars can democratize knowledge production and dissemination. This feat is accomplished through openly sharing, reflecting, critiquing, improving, validating, and furthering their scholarship via publicly-availably online venues (e.g., blogs, Twitter, etc). To participate productively in online scholarly networks, however, scholars not only need to understand the participatory nature of the web, they also need to develop the social and digital literacies and skills essential to effective engagement with the open scholarship commons. Lack of digital literacies leads to a participation gap (cf. Jenkins et al., 2006), which, in the context of scholars, refers to those scholars who participate in networked spaces and are able to take advantage of digital literacies to advance their career vis-à-vis those who have had no exposure to participatory cultures or who do not have the essential literacies to engage in such activities online.
Understanding participatory cultures, developing digital literacies, and participating in online scholarly networks, however, does not necessarily mean that scholars will become equal participants in online spaces. Social stratification and exclusion in online environments and networks is possible. Indulging in idealized notions of participation and sharing may be misguided because interaction and collaboration may not be the norm across all individuals or scholarly subcultures. As Chander and Sunder (2004, p. 1332) point out while discussing what they term the romance of the public domain, [c]ontemporary scholarship extolling the public domain presumes a landscape where each person can reap the riches found in the commons [b]ut, in practice, differing circumstances - including knowledge, wealth, power, and ability - render some better able than others to exploit a commons. Thus, in the case of open scholarship, issues surrounding the accessibility and use of scholarly networks by diverse audiences will arise and should be a matter of concern for participants when considering who profits from their collaborative work.
At the moment, the open scholarship movement largely reflects the values of the early adopters who already engage with it and includes notions of openness, sharing, and social-collaborative research. As with those in any community, scholars engaging in the open scholarship commons are susceptible to the risks of making decisions about the future of their community which may be arbitrary, prejudiced, or otherwise harmful to the community's well-being. Thus, scholars should be vigilant and reflective of open scholarly practices as such practices continue to emerge and develop. Such vigilance should focus both on determining who profits from such practices and who is excluded from them, so as to combat both under-use by some (i.e. those lacking entry to or knowledge of useful networks) and over-use or exploitation by those with the wealth, power, and prestige necessary to effectively strip mine sources. While solutions to these problems may not be simple, we need to acknowledge, discuss, and act upon these issues proactively rather than retrospectively.
Students, instructors, and librarians are finding new opportunities for experiential and collaborative online learning with OJS.
In addition to its original goal of increasing access to high-quality academic content, the free/open source Open Journal Systems software is increasingly making an impact in the areas of experiential and collaborative learning. Students have begun using the software to create their own graduate, undergraduate, and high school journals, engaging in a critical process of 'learning by doing' to discover the real world challenges of the scholarly publishing process. Instructors have started using the software in the classroom, taking advantage of its professional online peer review system to have students evaluate one anothers' work. And librarians are building new research commons and developing publishing services to support this process, and are finding the opportunity to deepen their information literacy instruction, basing it on students' direct experience with the peer-review system. This session will provide a brief overview of these new developments, including some case studies, and provide information about trying it out for yourself.
Open science and OER are based on similar legal, technical, and social drivers, but in what ways are they actually compatible efforts?
The word "open" as been appended to myriad phenomena to date, ranging from "open access" to "open government"to "open source software." But while there are certainly some fundamental characteristics which are shared across these diverse applications of the word "open," each of these "open"efforts may not be so seamlessly interoperable as we might think.
In this session, we will closely examine the intersection of ?open science? and ?OER?. Open science is a catch-all term that generally refers to the democratization of the capacity for anyone to ?do? science (e.g., ?citizen science? efforts in fields from astronomy to ecology to meteorology) as well as the elimination of the barriers to accessing the outputs of scientific research (e.g., research papers, datasets, etc). ?Open research? and ?open data? are, respectively, broader and narrower terms that overlap with the open science meme. The term ?OER? generally refers to the openly licensed teaching, learning, and research resources used in the service of education, though the term has also been used as shorthand for ?open education? and related concepts that go beyond the materials of education and include educational practices, policies, and infrastructure.
To better understand the points of overlap among these two concepts, we will attempt to diagram different facets of each effort, considering the key drivers, barriers, and current initiatives in each case. For example, many scientists remain skeptical about open science because the concept seems at odds with the need for scientific expertise and precision, such as for experimental design and analysis. Similarly, many producers of educational resources remain skeptical of OER because they have questions about quality, accuracy, and the locus of responsibility for the content. But these seemingly overlapping areas of skepticism are actually directed at very different aspects of each enterprise, and they are likely to demand different solutions and different messaging. As we outline and then consider the different facets of the processes of science and education, we are hoping to better discern how the open science and OER communities may be able to build on shared messaging and developments, or may be better served by pursuing some agendas separately.
As more educational institutions increase their online/open education programs, students and faculty will depend on digital content as part of course instruction. As a result, students and faculty may invest in mobile devices to access such content. Mobile devices will include EReaders and tablets. This discussion session will address trends in mobile technologies which may complement open education, as well as new ETextbook and resource formats that are accessible through a wide variety of devices.
A fundamental assumption regarding online education asserts that instruction and content will move away from static text toward video and interactive texts. The discussion facilitator(s) of this session will ask three main questions: (1)What types of content do faculty currently provide in open education environments?, (2)What type of technology and devices are necessary to access this content?, and (3)Can today's EReaders, smartphones, and iPads provide an appropriate medium for open education content? Participants in the discussion will share research findings, relevant projects or initiatives, and first-hand experiences relevant to these three questions.
The average student spends more than $1000 on textbooks each year. Come learn how OER is reversing that trend and what you can do to help.
Influence of a national initiative on OER, Wikiwijs, on innovation of infrastructure in The Netherlands
Open educational resources movement is roughly ten years old (Wiley & Gurell, 2009). Since that time thousands and thousands of resources have been produced. Though these resources have been used both for classroom development and the autodidact, the development of OER is not without problems. One possible reason for the limited reuse observed is the barrier of technology. Tools to help educators find appropriate educational resources are necessary, but still nascent. Some OER is easier to view, revise and remix than others. For example, a PDF cannot be easily altered, but is widely viewed. This is only one possible reason that OER is only being minimally reused (Wiley, 2009). This presentation will examine the results of a Delphi study and an experiment in rating a sample of OER to measure technical difficulty in reuse.
Some OER is easier to view, revise and remix than others. For example, a PDF cannot be easily altered, but is widely viewed. In contrast, a file save in the XCF format for the GIMP photo editor is a fully open format, but cannot be easily viewed. Hilton, Wiley, Stein and Johnson (2010) created the ALMS analysis framework to assess the technical openness of an open educational resource. Unlike Geser (2007), Hilton et al. (2010) the framework suggests that openness is a continuum, rather than a binary concept.
Although the ALMS framework allows for an assessment of open educational resources, no actual measurement is reported in the Hilton III et al. (2010). The framework has not been tested because there is no known rubric with which measurement can occur. Consequently, Hilton III?s framework needs to be tested against a range of open educational resources. The ALMS analysis framework consists of the following elements:
- Access to editing tools?
- Level of expertise required to revise or remix?
- Meaningfully editable?
- Source-file access?
Although the ALMS framework allows for an assessment of open educational resources, no actual measurement is reported in the Hilton III et al. (2010). The presentation will explore an attempt take the concept of an ALMS analysis to a concrete framework with sufficient detail and documentation to allow for inter-rater reliability to be measured and comparisons to be made against OER.
Beginning with all new instructional development starting in July, the Georgia Virtual School, a program of the Georgia Department of Education, will be focusing on Open Educational Resources for all of its content and learning material. All teacher created material used in the courses will have the Creative Commons licensing applied. Once created, this material will be made available through the Georgia Virtual Learning website. Preview some of the current courses that are being shared and review the list of upcoming courses. Georgia Virtual School is aiming for 30+ OER courses with Creative Commons licensing to be available to the educational community by June of 2012 with an increasing number of courses to be added to the list during the next several years.
A number-by-number look at the state of open textbooks today - how many are there? where are they used? what is the impact on students?
As a stepping stone between the bricks and mortar texts of today and the innovative, technology-rich learning environments of tomorrow, open textbooks have become one of the fastest-growing and widely-recognized sectors of the OER movement.
This session will dive into the numbers for a close look at the current state of open textbooks - how many are there? where are they used? what is the impact on students? It will also consider other indicators, such as faculty opinions, portrayal in the media, and the most successful open textbook-related efforts. The information presented will include extensive research conducted by the Student PIRGs and a wealth of data from Flat World Knowledge, the largest producer of open textbooks.
Attendees will walk away knowing the latest news on open textbooks, a history of how far we have come, and what we're likely to see in the future. To the extent open textbooks are a gateway to OER adoption by the mainstream, this session will be relevant to virtually anyone with an interest in open education.
This session introduces the concept of agile courseware development for OER on mobile devices. This includes the use of really short iterations, functional testing, continuous integration and building simple course components, items or modules.
Open educational resources (OER) are becoming widely available and accessible. They can be designed/adapted/assembled and disseminated widely. This session introduces the concept of agile courseware development for OER on mobile devices. This includes the use of really short iterations, functional testing, continuous integration and building simple course components, items or modules. Proven techniques include early, concrete and continuous feedback, incremental and evolving planning, flexible scheduling texting and ongoing collaboration among course development team members. The notion of inclusive and flexible design is also introduced for displaying content and applications on different-sized screens, enabling user preferences. Several problems are introduced to elluminate good practice. These include shedule slippage; project cancellations; defect escalation; misunderstanding among developers, subject matter experts and users; feature glut; and staff turnover. Focusing on the control variables of cost, time, quality and scope, this paper highlights priority areas and the means for overcoming the problems encountered to ensure the successful completion of course development projects.
How can teachers collaboratively plan lessons to deliver better classes while leaving resources for others to build upon?
Collaborative Lesson Planning, or CLP, is a method for teachers to collaboratively plan lessons. This can be accomplished within the confines of one school and online. The internet has more potential and is currently underutilized. The cycle is 1) teacher puts their lesson plan online; 2) teacher delivers lesson; 3) teacher reviews lesson (via AAR http://www.army.mil/features/FM7/FM%207-0.pdf p. 98) and publishes the review online; 4) teacher gets feedback, then incorporates into a revised version of the plan and goes back to step 1.
Over time the quality of their own lessons will likely improve and an Open Educational Resource (OER) online that other instructors can use and improve will be built. Eventually that OER should have many plans for the same textbook chapter/topic modifiable for classes with differing numbers of students or abilities.
My research in CLP started when I was a new English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher in Japan. I searched online for lesson plans and other resources I could use for my classes but was frequently frustrated by what I found, or, more importantly, did not find. I then made my own lesson (e.g. months of the year), which EFL teachers have taught before. I was re-inventing the wheel.
I feel this was a waste of my time. As Eric S. Raymond writes in "How to Become a Hacker", "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." My time would have been better spent tweaking a proven effective lesson plan for my own students. Then I could have fed my work back into the cycle helping EFL teachers around the globe.
I do not want other new teachers to repeat my experience. To that end I published virtually all of my lessons from China on Wikiversity (http://is.gd/kV2gMP) and am collaborating with other users to improve them. I edited a book edition of them published in early 2011 by PediaPress (http://is.gd/CrQyYp). Additionally I have co-organized two courses on CLP at The Peer 2 Peer University with Dr. Marjorie King and am currently co-organizing a study group there. That is the center for the online discussion about the subject.
At this presentation I hope to share findings about effective ways to implement CLP. I will illuminate best practices and share stories from my work in the field. Then I will outline a simple "how to" for others implementing CLP. Finally I will share the future possibilities and next year's goals for CLP.
The National Training & Education Resource (NTER) was designed as an open source platform to foster a new ecosystem in the training and education space.
This presentation examines localization of OER in Himalayan community technology centers of Nepal. Specifically, I examine strategies and practices that local knowledge-workers utilize in order to localize educational content for the disparate needs, interests, and ability-levels of learners in rural villages.
This study is specifically focused on a sample of seven Nepalese technology centers to better understand how localization is defined, designed, and executed at a ground level. I illuminate obstacles knowledge-workers face while localizing content and strategies to overcome such barriers. I conclude by offering key principles to support theory development related to OER localization. This qualitative study employed interviews, focus group discussions, observations, and artifact reviews to identify patterns of localization practices and themes related to localization of critical content in Himalayan community technology centers of Nepal. This dissertation provides valuable evidence of how localization is executed and concrete ways that localization could be improved in order for OER to reap efficacious learning gains for more rural people in developing countries across the globe.
Teachers needs to think about how to create Open Information Systems in order to their students could use their Personal Learning Environments. We'll present an example of how to build them.
Some teachers love the idea of create Personal Learning Environment in order to make possible for their students to configure the way they want to organize their task, to access to the open content which they or their colleagues have created, and finally to learn. Social web has promised several technologies to make possible such thing and lots of teachers are implementing those technologies in their classrooms.
Our presentation is focusing on the idea that teachers needs to aim their efforts to design the open information system with the content and services they think are of interest for their students and let the students decide how to use it instead of thinking only about which technology will support their PLE's,
Teachers should create those systems using the technology available in order to syndicate their open content or to easily use services and be sure the student owns the technical skills to accomplish it.
Our presentation is showing an example of the methodology we have applied to design an Open Information System in order to be used by students in a higher education context. Also, we?ll provide information about academic achievement and student's evaluation of their own learning process.
Open Information Systems are for Open Content
An Open Information System can be defined as a system configured to grant the access without restrictions to anybody or any other system to the information available. The open content is not open if it is not available in such way. To facilitate at maximum the availability of the content, the open system has to offer a number of capabilities like visibility, discovering, sorting by criteria and easy delivering.
Open Information Systems in an easy way
Create an information system is not enough if it cannot be accessed in an easy way or there are too many barriers for it. (security + privacy + technical difficulty + incompatible formats + linguistic +?.) After designing the information system, to choose the right technology is one of the keys in order to create a system that the average-skilled student could use.
The making-off
Considering all these premises, during last academic year we decided to address our efforts to produce open content and to create an open information system that the students could use.
One of the student's task was to create learning objects using a tool called eXelearning, which is widely used in the Spanish educational world. The students have to deliver their work under an open license to the Open Information System created.
We are going to present an example of an Open Information System we have created using wikis, question&answers systems, blogs and mobile devices and the results in terms of academic achievement and learning experience satisfaction in the students.
Results of a study to three different potential business models for OER @ Open Universiteit Netherlands.
Open Educational Resources encompass a wide set of resources ( e.g., learning materials, courseware, software tools, educational services and support ) that are freely shared within an educational community. There are many ways to do so, in terms of underlying technology, development, maintenance, support, and funding schemes. Downes (2007) provides an overview of these diverse models for funding, technical, content and staffing. But although several case studies and other reports on OER initiatives have been published (e.g., Caswell, Henson, Jensen & Wiley (2008); Smith (2009)), it seems that sustainable OER business models have yet to take shape (Stacey (2007); Smith, (2009)).
At the Open Universiteit (the Netherlands), experiments started in 2010 at two faculties to implement a new business model with a specific role for OER. Parallel to this, a study was initiated to get more insight into potentially succesful models to have a sustainable way to publish OER. Three different models were proposed:
? The current situation (most course materials closed and only a few OER, not used for regular education)
? From each regular course, 10% is offered as OER. OER is also used in regular education
? (Almost) all course materials are offered 100% as OER. The Open Universiteit will offer payed services to make it sustainable
Each situation will be described using the canvas for business models by Osterwalder (2010). Furthermore, current students of the Open Universiteit are interviewed to get a picture of what services they would be willing to pay for.
The paper will present the results of this study.
Photography thrives as its industry dies.What if you used those same destructive forces to work for you, your photography and your teaching?
Clearly, this is why DTU's have a keen interest in course exchange. More often than not, however, course exchange turns out to be highly complicated due to the differences between DTU's, both in terms of their pedagogic and educational traditions and in terms of all kinds of legal issues. This is why the concept of complementary course production ( this concept was developed by Trevor Herbert of the OUUK ) is interesting in that this concept involves international co-operation without students having to travel abroad. Complementary course production is tantamount to the following: several DTU's agree on a specific theme for a new course. Each participating institution makes its own course, on the understanding that all materials which are produced and used by the participating institutions are offered as open education resources. In this way each participating institution may profit from, and use and adapt, all the materials prepared by all the participants.
Learn how the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State is supporting the architectural studio with an open learning environment.
The Knowlton School of Architecture (KSA) at The Ohio State University educates design professionals in Architecture and related disciplines. Core learning takes place in the studio, an open space in which groups of learners work through iterative processes to respond to design challenges. The spirit of openness and peer-to-peer learning are the tenets of studio culture; sharing and learning from fellow students is critical to the learning process.
The studio environment cultivates visual learners who need specialized resources that support a rich image and media environment. Studios often collaborate with outside parties who may act as clients, jurors, or consultants, which necessitates openness in workflows, content, and systems. Open workflows and tools that support rich media interaction with external parties are not a part of many traditional learning systems. Therefore, the KSA web team's response to the studio environment includes two specialized Drupal web applications: the Digital Library, a library of educational digital media that supports the curricula and is host to the School's Open Educational Resources, and Community, a collaboration platform.
Because it is often difficult to use traditional libraries to engage in research and learning that is primarily visual in nature, the Digital Library offers visual materials at the most granular scale. Maintaining this granularity both maximizes flexibility in the discovery and use of the library's media and enables learners to self direct their learning processes. The Library contains media that offer "just-in-time" learning opportunities, historic and contemporary examples of architectural techniques, and examples of built works in various phases that further expose the design process to students. Studio participants can also contribute media directly to the Digital Library, building the collections for future students and others in the discipline.
The Community website provides a collaboration space for studio participants to post their work where peers and external critics can review and comment. The site is capable of managing the visual documentation used in the studio and also keeps track of students' authored materials, allowing for reuse outside the bounds of their enrollment in a course or at the School. The iterative nature of the studio is revealed as students post their work in various design phases. The site, then, captures the evolution of each student's project over the course of the term, and because each posted item has its own visibility control, students may share their work with peers or external audiences. Planning this site with openness in mind allows for student dialog with external reviewers, but also allows for informal dialog with others who are not enrolled in the course. Learners using the Community platform may also export media and related metadata to the Digital Library. This enriches the educational resources in the Digital Library while allowing the School to create efficiencies in data and system management.
Adopters and authors may evaluate and improve OER quality and utility. But who actually evaluates OER? Why? How? Should they improve? What are the issues?
Can we turn students from passive Takers into active Makers using Open Source solutions? Yes!
The current buzz in K-12 education is about 21st Century skills and self-directed learning. But this vision is at odds with the passive consumer attitude of many of our current students. FOSS solutions can be the transformative key.
While schools often adopt FOSS solutions to save money (a fine reason), the true value of Open Source for education is that Open Source shows the reality of engaged cooperation on a global scale on projects of substance. It is the model of cross-cultural, real-world, project-based learning that our education system is desperately seeking to inspire our students to gain these 21st century skills that are so important to future success.
This talk will explore this potential and review some exciting new developments such as open hardware Makerbot 3D printers appearing in high schools, HFOSS projects igniting participation of students to help with crisis situation around the globe and the launch in South Carolina of the Open IT Lab, a national FOSS resource for K-12 schools around the country.
Our work is focused on not only connecting related OER learning objects, but also creating a common voice behind these objects to better simulate the flow of a textbook.
Ever more open educational resources (OER) are being packed into content repositories. As we all are likely aware, much of that movement is driven by the challenge of rising textbook costs for students and its effect on access to college courses. Open textbooks are one solution; a good one, at that. However, delivery platforms continue to evolve, and the cost of sustaining open textbook development and maintaining currency remains a challenge, suggesting that open textbooks might not be the end-all solution. So, what about the smaller OER objects? Can these be collected in such a way as to include all the necessary objectives of courses? If so, then we need to thread these objects together sequentially in order to provide an equivalent flow of course material to students.
At College of the Canyons, with the generous support of the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), we have taken on the challenge of not only collecting additional OER objects, but binding them together in a content playlist, of sorts. Of course, there are other efforts to do such things (OER Glue). We seek to go further to provide an underlying and consistent voice to the materials. By linking individual OER objects and padding them with transition pieces provided by a single source, a collection of OER is essentially walked-through by a narrator.
We are currently in the development stage of two content playlists and will soon be ready to test and implement them. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of our accomplishments to date and what to expect by the end of our grant.
This presentation will provide the context for the development of Writing Commons, a peer-reviewed academic, OER.
Writing Commons aspires to be a community for writers, a creative learning space for students in courses that require college-level writing, a creative, interactive space for teachers to share resources and pedagogy. MP900433057
* First, we provide resources students need to improve their writing. Writing Commons offers free access to an award-winning, college textbook, which was published by a major publisher in 2003 and received the Distinguished Book Award in 2004 from Computers and Composition, an academic journal. Site Map
* Second, in the spirit of the cultural commons, we invite our readers, particularly college faculty and students, to help us develop this text, so that it meets the needs of students in diverse writing courses. Call for Writers
* Third, because we believe students learn chiefly by writing and by sharing reviews of one another's texts, we provide a writing space for students to develop profile pages, chat with classmates, and share pictures and notes: Community!
We aspire to be a ";commons-based peer production" community Peer Production tools are like 21st Century barn-building; they allow for massive acts of collaborative creation by asking for just a little effort from each contributor. As espoused by both scholarly authors (Benkler; Brown and Duguid; boyd and Ellison; Barton and Cummings; Jenkins) and trade book authors (Li and Bernoff; Gillmor; Tapscott and Williams; Weinberger), peer-production tools democratize power, redistributing the means of production from a one-way communication model, like a CBS broadcasting tower, to an increasingly community-driven model, where individuals contribute freely and democratically. Peer-production technologies are more powerful than they might at first seem: they allow users to add content which affects the way knowledge is constructed. Perhaps the most intriguing idea to emerge from the evolution of social media and peer production is the possibility of collective intelligence, the notion that crowds of people working collaboratively via an online tool such as Wikipedia can create ideas that are unique, different, and smarter than the ideas of individuals working in collaboration. James Surowiecki, George Siemens, Henry Jenkins, and Howard Rheingold have theorized that peer-production tools empower users to create a new "emergent" knowledge that individuals working alone could not develop. Peer-production technologies change the ways we exchange ideas, organize ourselves, and create knowledge (Weinberger; Shirky; Jenkins); encourage democratic decision-making (Benkler; Shirky; Rheingold); transform how people write and think about ourselves (Lanier); and encourage ethical behavior (Benkler and Nissenbaum). It's only natural, then, that they also change how we organize our institutions of higher learning (Taylor, End of the University.), particularly textbooks. By this we mean that we hope that crowds of people--from experts such as professors and professional writers to undergraduate students--can collaborate with us to revise the pages we've already written as well as write new pages. We are inspired by the ways peer-production tools democratize power, redistributing the means of production from a one-way communication model, like a CBS broadcasting tower, to an increasingly community-driven model, where individuals contribute freely and democratically. By working collaboratively, we are hopeful that we can develop a new kind of writing textbook, a textbook not written by a single author in the old-school way but by us, by a crowd of people out there who think we need a new kind of writing text, one that is more interactive, more Web 2.0ish--a text that can be easily edited to meet your needs, a text that is readily available on your phone, PDA, or netbook, an expansive textbook that meets the needs of any college-level writer.
We discuss a core assumption of OER: that fully open courseware can and should be produced without financial incentives for its authors.
One central assumption in the OER movement is that high quality content can be developed without necessarily introducing a financial motivation for academic authors to produce such materials. Such is the view, for example, of the Connexions Consortium. Academic recognition and the ability to establish a professional reputation, the reasoning goes, are sufficient motivation among many faculty to consider contributing to the rapidly expanding pool of OER texts. Some academic institutions, moreover, will consider OER publications in the tenure review process, providing perhaps the greatest incentive to produce first rate work without additional compensation.
To be sure, there are notable exceptions to this OER content model. For-profit companies, such as Flatworld Knowledge and Textbook Media, and non-profit (foundations, government) sponsorship of OER production, provide financial incentives. The for-profit companies, however, are far more restrictive on the use and distribution of their content than is a truly open source platform like Connexions. Non-profit sponsorship of OER materials is in an early stage and it is still unclear the level of sustained backing for such projects. For the entirely unfettered OER content, then, the OER movement assumes that high quality content will be produced much like crowd-sourced projects, such as Wikipedia, with the added difference that primary authors would be recognized as such.
I would like to suggest that this is a mistaken assumption and that the OER movement would benefit by conceiving of an OER content development model that provides for ongoing compensation to its authors while also adhering to the most open form of the Creative Commons license. What?s needed, in other words, is a Connexions Consortium with a revenue component. The organization might still be non-profit but not the authors who are creating the works. The OER movement holds great promise but in order for it to be a sustainable alternative to traditional sources it must insist on the highest possible standards for academic content. In order to do this, it must incent the greatest number of potential contributors to participate.
The "recognition" model certainly inspires some authors to contribute, but if you are an author already with tenure or at an institution that does not consider introductory textbooks for tenure review, then you have to be highly motivated to contribute to the public good as an end in itself. Of course there are faculty committed to the project in this way but they are a very small group of the available talent. As great as the potential is for OER, it faces two integrally linked obstacles: convincing prospective faculty adopters of these materials on the grounds that they are equal to or better than those from traditional sources, and convincing first-rate faculty authors to produce it. The former, of course, depends on the latter. And unless the OER model is sufficiently broadened to include a financial incentive that would appeal to a large portion of prospective faculty authors, the movement will not realize its extraordinary potential.
OER policy is being adopted in Brazil at different levels and OER is finally in the news. Join us in the discussion of this country choice.
Previous OCW research has focused on the users and institution. The instructor's perspective is the focus of this qualitative case study.
Summary
This paper covers perceived benefits and costs of instructors who contributed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. Data comes from six years worth of surveys, follow-up interviews with contributing MIT instructors, and a content analysis of written feedback comments received by the MIT OCW team.
Introduction
In Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OCW contributing instructors prepare their materials and offer their course content to the world to be used and altered by others. Many wondered how MIT would overcome the seeming paradox of having instructors, who traditionally (1) protect their creative works, (2) are short on time, and (3) believe their classrooms are a private place, contribute to a project which would require (1) licensing their materials in an unfamiliar way; (2) more of their time; and (3) publicly publishing their works, inviting review, criticism, and scrutiny.
With these apparent costs of contributing to MIT OCW, why would instructors volunteer to be involved? Why would they be interested in essentially giving away their creations, forgoing the standard copyright approach? Why would they risk the marketability and commercialization of their course content? Why would instructors be willing to put in any extra time? Why would they make their content openly available for anyone to review? Because contributing is largely voluntary, instructors must feel that contribution to MIT OCW brings them benefits which outweigh the costs of contributing.
Case Description
This study reviewed an existing case, namely MIT OCW, in an attempt to identify and describe the reasons instructors contribute their content to the project. It was hoped that by understanding the benefits and costs for contributing, open dissemination opportunities might become more understood and, perhaps, accepted and common throughout the world. The focus is to find out why instructors are willing to contribute their educational content to MIT OpenCourseWare.
Methodology
This study examines perceived benefits and costs of instructors who contributed to MIT OCW. While previous research has investigated the benefits and costs of OCW projects from the perspectives of the users and institutions, there has been little research on the instructor's perspective, which is the focus of this qualitative case study. Instructors created the original educational content and would seem to have the most to lose by contributing it to OCW.
Data comes from six years worth of surveys conducted by the evaluation team of the MIT OCW project, follow-up interviews with contributing MIT instructors, and a content analysis of written feedback comments received by the MIT OCW team.
Findings
Findings include instructor benefits of: (1) improved reputation, (2) networking, (3) supplementary opportunities, (4) improved course content, (5) course feedback, (6) students accessing materials, and (7) working with the MIT OCW team; and instructor costs of: (1) damaged reputation, (2) loss of intellectual property rights, (3) requirement of extra resources, (4) realignment of individual professional goals, (5) public materials, and (6) working with the MIT OCW team.
Analysis of quality and quantity of learner interaction with content, peers, and instructors in a virtual open high school setting.