Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Vietnam Selected to Host OCWC Global 2010 Conference

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on March 31, 2009
in opencourseware
. 0 Comments

Washington, D.C., March 31, 2009 - The OpenCourseWare Consortium is pleased to announce Vietnam will be the site of the 2010 Annual OCWC Global Meeting. OCWC is honored that the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) and the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) have agreed to organize the international event in cooperation with the OCWC. The 2010 OCWC Global Meeting will take place in Hanoi on May 5-7, 2010.

Dr. Stephen Maxner, Chairman of the VEF Board of Directors, said, “It is truly a great honor that Vietnam is selected to be the site of this important 2010 Annual OCWC Global Meeting. VEF and MOET, together with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Vietnam Advanced Software Company (VASC), have been instrumental in developing the Vietnam OpenCourseWare (VOCW) in Vietnam since its inception after the historic visit of former Prime Minister Phan Van Khai to the United States in 2005. VEF is honored to be chosen to be a primary coordinator for this important event. The 2010 Annual OCWC Global Meeting will facilitate the participation of Vietnamese faculty and students in accessing this online repository of knowledge and in understanding the emerging OCW movement in the world.”

Standing Vice Minister of MOET, Prof. Dr. Banh Tien Long, commented, “MOET is pleased to co-sponsor this meaningful event with VEF and OCWC. MOET has been supportive in bringing OCW to Vietnam. We consider the VOCW Program an invaluable resource to address the lack of learning and teaching materials in Vietnam and we have made efforts to disseminate VOCW to faculty and students nationwide. The 2010 Annual OCWC Global Meeting to be hosted in Vietnam is an outstanding opportunity for Vietnamese universities to network with various OCW experts from around the world.”

Mr. Steve Carson, President of the OpenCourseWare Consortium said, “With its innovative government run program, Vietnam has quickly become a significant contributor to the OpenCourseWare movement. Choosing Hanoi as the location of the conference in part recognizes that contribution and sets the frame for a discussion of sustainable institutional models for OpenCourseWare development and dissemination. We are honored to be working with VEF and MOET to put together this exciting event.”

The Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) (www.vef.gov) is a special initiative by the U.S. Congress to bring the United States and Vietnam closer through educational exchanges related to science, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and technology. The Foundation is in its sixth year of operations and incorporates assistance from the U.S. National Academies in developing and executing VEF programs: the VEF Fellowship program, the Visiting Scholar Program, and the U.S. Faculty Scholar Grant Program. Among VEF’s science and technology capacity building endeavors is the VOCW Project. VEF serves as a financial provider and program manager of VOCW. VEF promotes VOCW among its grant recipients and partners inside and outside of Vietnam. For additional information on VOCW, please visit: www.vocw.edu.vn.

The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) (www.moet.gov.vn) is the governmental body responsible for education and training in Vietnam. MOET formulates government policies and regulations to encourage rapid deployment and utilization of VOCW at Vietnamese educational institutions at all levels. It is fundamentally responsible for the successful integration of VOCW into Vietnamese educational institutions.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) (www.ocwconsortium.org) is a collaboration of more than 250 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.

A PDF of the full press release can be found here.

International Workshop on Technology for Education (T4E ‘09) Call For Papers Announced

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on March 30, 2009
in opencourseware
. 2 Comments

T4E ‘09 has announced a call for papers for their Bangalore workshop. The workshop will be held August 4-6, 2009 in Bangalore, India. The workshop is co-sponsored by the OCWC and will focus on original academic or industrial research into the effects technology of education.

The theme areas are as follows:

  • Growth and impact of the Open Educational Resources movement
  • Creation of techniques and standards for accurate identification of relevant learning-resources for a given task
  • Semantic web technologies for application in the areas mentioned above
  • Personalization of education and student modeling for this purpose

OCWC members are encouraged to consider contributing to this conference.

You can read the full call for papers here.

Students as Evangelists of OCW

Published
by
Meena Hwang
on March 26, 2009
in opencourseware
. 1 Comment

I am proud to announce a group of exceptional students at Korea University. Some of you know that a couple undergraduate students have been pitching in to help with the OCW project at KU. Just a week ago, there was a meeting with 73 students who want to volunteer their time to increase awareness of OCW in Korea and to help with the OCW project at Korea University.

These students are divided into four groups: technology, translation, content generating, and PR. In 2008, I spoke very briefly about some students working on the Google Android Challenge. Now, this group of students will be working on technology that promotes OCW activities. We are on eduCommons at the moment, and the first mission of these students in the technology group is to build an eduCommons site for two universities and an organization in Korea. Their goal is to assist institutions to start OCW with less worries about the technology part.

The translation group will be working on some excellent OCW/OER materials from abroad so that more Koreans who don’t have the English ability to easily access these materials may enjoy quality educational material. This group was required to send in a sample translation piece, and believe me, these kids are just amazing.

Content generating group takes on the responsibility of making OCW contents. Yes, the faculty have the most advanced knowledge in the discipline, but that does not mean that our students are not capable of generating quality educational material.

More than anything, these are the kids who will be evangelists of OCW and opening up our education. They have very deep conviction as to why this must be done. Through transparency and sharing, we will be able to achieve what was not even conceivable even a decade ago. And I believe that these are the kids who will make it happen. Oh, the excitement!!

Proposed Amendments to Bylaws

Published
by
Terri Bays
on March 23, 2009
in ocw consortium and ocwc
. 0 Comments

Dear Colleagues,

As required in Article X of the OCWC Bylaws, last Friday I posted 30-days notice of seven measures calling for amendments to those bylaws. The certified voting representative for each OCWC Member will have the opportunity to vote by proxy on these measures between April 16, 2009 and April 21, 2009.

To download the Proposed Amendments to the OCWC Bylaws arranged on a measure-by-measure basis, please visit:

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/docman/2009-bylaws-amendments-measure-by-measure/download.html

To download the Proposed Amendments to the OCWC Bylaws in their entirety, please visit:

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/docman/2009-bylaws-amendments-entire/download.html

Please fee free to contact me at tbays@ocwconsortium.org if you have any questions about individual amendments or this process in general.

Best wishes,

Terri

OCW Finder, OER Recommender Future Directions Meeting

Published
by
Tom Caswell
on March 19, 2009
in news, ocw, oer and resources
. 0 Comments

Folksemantic is a project to create tools that increase the impact of open education resources by helping people find, filter, collaborate around, and remix them. As part of the project, work is underway to integrate the OCW Finder, OER Recommender, and Luvfoo. Plans are to improve these tools and add collaboration, personalized recommendation, widgets, and publishing features. COSL is holding an online meeting on March 26 to describe the Folksementic project and solicit input. See http://oerrecommender.org/mtg to learn more.

Working Session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at OCWC Global 2009

Published
by
Terri Bays
on March 19, 2009
in Fair Use, OCWC Conference, copyright, creative commons, education, educational, intellectual property, licensing, ocw, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and remix
. 2 Comments

You may have heard rumors that some of the US OCW producers have been working on a project to explore issues of Fair Use in Open Educational Resources.  Fair Use is the US version of a phenomena more generally known as Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, and most OCW projects have started out with the conservative assumption that they don’t get much fair use coverage.  Some lawyers are starting to say otherwise, however, so the Fair Use Working Group is gathering data about how OERs in the US are negotiating Fair Use.  The hope is to publish a Code of Best Practice for OER later in the year.

But the OCWC is a global consortium, so the Fair Use project is only one part of a larger initiative to explore the implications of Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (CELs) for OER’s.  We’ve started a wiki page for this larger initiative entitled Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, where you can see a conceptual map for the larger project as we see it so far.  You’ll also see a link to a draft page for gathering data about CELs in different legal jurisdictions.  Use the comment tabs on either page to share your ideas!  We’ll be hosting a working session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at the OCWC Global Meeting in Monterrey, Mexico next month, with Ahrash Bissell from CC Learn as our facilitator.  At the session we’ll discuss what additional data it would be useful to gather and walk through the data gathering process.

A New Community Announcement List

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on March 4, 2009
in committees, ocwc, opencourseware and publicity
. 1 Comment

As part of the refined focus of the OCWC, we want to help enable connections and communication between members.  As a step towards that focus, we have created a new email list which will allow members to post announcements to the rest of the membership.  The list is named community [at] ocwconsortium [dot] org. Continue reading ‘A New Community Announcement List’