Archive for the 'open educational resources' Category

$16.5 million in grants for groundbreaking remedial education programs

Published
by
Terri Bays
on June 25, 2009
in education, news, oer, open educational resource, open educational resources, remedial education and teaching
. 0 Comments

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and MDC, Inc. announced today that they are awarding $16.5 million in grants to community colleges and states “to expand groundbreaking remedial education programs that experts say are key to dramatically boosting the college completion rates of low-income students and students of color” (http://bit.ly/wouV8). A significant portion of the grants, especially those made to the states, will go towards enhancement of tracking systems so that systems can tell how well their efforts are succeeding.

These are important initiatives, and we hope that the grantees will follow the lead set by the beneficiaries of a recent £7.8 million grant in the UK (see bit.ly/ibBcB), designing their solutions with openness in mind. For much of what succeeds in these efforts defies description in an academic article or conference presentation. If successful methods are not to slip away they must not only be measured and celebrated but also shared at a level of specificity rarely delivered outside of classroom observation or the publication of open educational resources. Naturally, we at the OCWC favor the OER approach!

Nor is OER useful only as a way of promulgating retention methods. Carol Lincoln, director of the Developmental Education Initiative and national director of Achieving the Dream for MDC says:

The pressing need to shore up weak academic skills in first-year students is one of the most significant, but least discussed, problems confronting higher education. Colleges that can figure out how to quickly and efficiently boost basic skills, particularly among students of color and low-income students, will play a leading role in helping them earn the college degrees necessary for economic success in America today. (see http://bit.ly/wouV8)

Teaching with OER provides quick, efficient, strategic remediation in the form of Flash Forward-Flash Back, a technique where an instructor “flashes back” to openly available background skills and information, granting students access to learning they missed the first time around. An instructor may also motivate current learning by flashing forward to applications in later coursework. This technique, and others like it, are particularly valuable to students who may be the first in their families to attend college and thus have considerably less opportunity to imagine where their efforts might lead them. As more and more courses become openly available, techniques like this will only increase in value.

Current Events in Context: Iran’s Election Dispute

Published
by
Steve Carson
on June 22, 2009
in current events, ocw consortium, open educational resources and opencourseware
. 0 Comments

The recent dramatic events in Iran bring together numerous complicated issues including the political and cultural history of Iran and the Middle East, the role of women in culture and politics, and the impact of social media on world events.  Courses throughout the OCW Consortium can be useful in providing context for the events surrounding the current election dispute.  The following is a list I’ve pulled together, drawing heavily on the MIT catalog I am most familiar with.  I encourage the OCW community to think of it as a starter list and to suggest additional resources.

Iranian History

21H.615 The Middle East in 20th Century (MIT)
Spring 2003

17.405 / 17.406 Seminar on Politics and Conflict in the Middle East (MIT)
Fall 2003

MELC 20040 - Islamic Societies of the Middle East and North Africa: Religion, History, and Culture
(Notre Dame)
Fall 2005

Democracy and Political Theory

21A.245J / 17.045J Power: Interpersonal, Organizational and Global Dimensions
Fall 2005

17.508 The Rise and Fall of Democracy/ Regime Change
Spring 2002

17.522 Politics and Religion
Fall 2006

21H.001 How to Stage a Revolution
Fall 2007

17.582 Civil War
Spring 2005

21A.225J / SP.621J / WGS.621J Violence, Human Rights, and Justice
Fall 2004

Women and Politics

17.905 Forms of Political Participation: Old and New
Spring 2005

New Media and Politics

CMS.998 / CMS.600 New Media Literacies
Spring 2007

Art 23AC Foundations of American Cyber-Culture
Fall 2007

21L.015 Introduction to Media Studies
Fall 2003

21A.348 Photography and Truth
Spring 2005

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 Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Courseware

Published
by
Garin Fons
on January 27, 2009
in Fair Use, copyright, education, hewlett, intellectual property, news, ocw and open educational resources
. 0 Comments

Corona of the Sun during a Solar Eclipse (No Known Copyright Restrictions)

Corona of the Sun During a Solar Eclipse (No known copyright)Â (from flickr commons: http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2534500722/)

A Note from the Fair Use on Open CourseWare team:

All of us have been frustrated by problems with third-party rights for open courseware materials. We know that if we could clarify when fair use applies, we could vastly expand the utility of what we do. And we know that in other cases, creative communities have done that. For instance, documentary filmmakers now find that insurers accept their claims of fair use, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. Similarly, media literacy teachers now can teach without fear, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. These codes of best practices were coordinated by Profs. Peter Jaszi and Pat Aufderheide, through the Center for Social Media and the Washington College of Law at American University.

We need a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware. A group of representatives at some of the open courseware universities—MIT, Tufts, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Yale, Notre Dame, Berkeley, Creative Commons—have started a project to do this, in coordination with Jaszi and Aufderheide, and with financial support from the Hewlett Foundation and from each of our universities. Each of the eight participating universities’ staff has set aside some part of their workload for this job.

Are you interested in helping to shape a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware? You can participate at several levels. If you would like to become a researcher on the project, just let Lindsey Weeramuni (lweera@mit.edu), the project’s coordinator know. Do you have a story to tell? Write Jaszi and Aufderheide at socialmedia@american.edu and we’ll connect you. Do you think your organization would eventually like to become a signatory? Let Lindsey know and we’ll be in touch when the document has been crafted, for your participation.

We hope to complete this work by September 1, so that the 2009-2010 school year can be a great one for open courseware.

Other questions or comments can also be directed here at open.michigan@umich.edu

Bridging the gap between 2- and 4-year colleges

Published
by
Terri Bays
on October 8, 2008
in education, educational, oer, online, open, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and teaching
. 0 Comments

Great article by Jeffrey Brainard in the Nov. 10th Chronicle of Higher Education about collaborations which assist aspriring engineers as they make the transition between 2- and 4-year colleges. This type of collaboration strikes me as a great opportunity for OCW-providers. Brainard observes that:

the road leading a two-year engineering student to be a full-fledged engineer has proven to be rough because it travels through four-year degree programs. Universities’ requirements for transfer credits vary, sometimes in unpredictable ways, making admissions hard and forcing some students to repeat course work. Even a little additional time and expense can force some of those students, who are frequently from lower-income families, out of engineering altogether.

He goes on to report on efforts in California and Maryland to smooth the transition, including an agreement among schools in Maryland which defines:

analytical skills and areas of knowledge expected of prospective transfers. Participating two-year colleges would ask their governing board, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, to certify that their courses leading to an associate degree in engineering provide students with all of those “learning outcomes.” Participating four-year institutions would, in turn, agree to accept all of the credits earned by those graduates.

The movement towards defining “analytical skills and areas of knowledge” is where the opportunity arises for OCW-producing institutions. From the 2-year institution’s end, ocw publication allows the faculty to demonstrate that their courses foster the requisite skills and knowledge for successful transfer. From the 4-year institution’s end, ocw publication allows greater communication with prospective transfers, who can supplement their learning at a 2-year institution with materials from the 4-year institution to which they aspire. Since engineering students transferring from two-year colleges “perform quite well. . . earn[ing] better grades and graduat[ing] at slightly higher rates than those who started at the four-year institutions,” they ought to be worth recruiting, and what better way to convince them to enroll than to give them a taste of what they can expect to get from your institution? What we’d love to see is a situation where students could demonstrate independent acquisition of skills and knowledge for transfer or placement credit, further reducing the chance that time and expense will force worthy students out of professions where they are sorely needed.

Nor is there any reason this should apply only to engineering. Any number of professional fields are suffering from a shortage of skilled workers. Any number of communities are suffering from a shortage of affordable training opportunities. Schools who open up their course materials will attract and place better students. And we all will benefit from that.

OCW at the Open University of Israel

Published
by
Steve Carson
on May 30, 2008
in ocw consortium, open educational resources and opencourseware
. 2 Comments

The Open University of Israel launched their OCW in March, with plans to publish course materials and more than 250 complete textbooks. Here is their announcement:

OCW at the Open University of Israel: free public access to on-line academic digital books and study materials

The Open University of Israel (OUI) is the largest university and academic publisher in Israel. With more than 40,000 students, it offers 650 courses in all major disciplines, and prints over a million copies of its textbooks annually. The university has a robust Hebrew-based home-grown LMS and it offers a rich variety of on-line learning models, including Web 2.0 applications. We use a hybrid (or blended) pedagogical model (Bonk, 2006) which combines distance a-synchronous tutoring with face-to-face sessions, some by video broadcasting to study centers and to students’ homes via their broadband web access.

In May 2008 the OUI launched the “Pe’er” OCW project (in Hebrew: “Opening Treasures of the Mind”, http://ocw.openu.ac.il/), with the intention to give free and open access to its learning materials and to a selected collection of its books. The project is was funded by the Rothchild Foundation and is conceptually similar to the OU-UK’s OpenLearn and to MIT’s OCW projects. The unique aspect of the OUI’s endeavor is the conversion of full titles from print to e-books and to audio books (in MP3 format). We began with 10 titles and will be opening more than 250 of our textbooks in 50 different courses to be freely available on-line. Many of the titles are supplemented by video lectures by the course designers or by other experts.

Additionally, the course core materials will be supplemented by reusable learning objects prepared by the teaching staff at OUI, like on-line quizzes, lecture summaries, presentations, dictionaries, and video-recordings of live sessions. The different items that will be made available to students and the to the general public, in the spirit of OCW. The Open University requires user registration in order to be able to assess public usage and user profiles. Our vision is to enable users to access OUI learning materials on mobile platforms and to add translated versions of the courses, initially in Arabic and Russian, for potential international audience.

iCue

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on May 14, 2008
in oer and open educational resources
. 0 Comments

This is an amazing potential resource for both OER and OCW.

Check it out. iCue. Registration is required.

Call for papers… Open Educational Resources

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on May 14, 2008
in oer and open educational resources
. 0 Comments

From here…

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are free to those licensed to use them. Available online from the European Commission’s e-learning portal eLearningEuropa, OERs offer numerous advantages and opportunities for teachers and learners. Continue reading ‘Call for papers… Open Educational Resources’

Open Educational Resources: Unlocking Knowledge to the Global Community

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on May 14, 2008
in hewlett, oer and open educational resources
. 9 Comments

Say hello to Open.Michigan

Published
by
Garin Fons
on April 28, 2008
in education, hewlett, news, ocw, open educational resources, opencourseware and publicity
. 2 Comments

cc:by - regents of the university of michigan

Anyone familiar in some small part with what has been happening with the University of Michigan’s Open Educational Resources initiative will already know we have had a number of great developments over the last few months. We’ve had student dScribes from the School of Information participate in a pilot program to help gather, vet, and clear content for publication and we’ve made significant progress on the development of the software tools we’ll use to manage the process of clearing course content.

But what we’re most excited about now is the emergence of what we’re calling … Open.Michigan

Open.Michigan is more than an Open educational Resources site. It represents the diverse collection of Open initiatives on campus - from open access publishing and open archives to open source software and open standards. The site provides greater visibility to the various projects and attempts to expand the dialogue between campus participants and external collaborators.

We also hope to build upon the Open Community’s strong participatory culture, inviting people to explore the Open.Michigan website, subscribing, authoring, and commenting on our blog, taking a look at our wiki, and following updates on our Twitter (open_michgan) and joining our new facebook group, Open.Michigan.

We’re excited about this transition and look forward to your feedback and participation as Open.Michigan continues to evolve and expand.