OLNet is now accepting application for its fellowship programs in which researchers and practitioners of OER are supported to carry out projects that “identify the value and evidence” of OER. There are three types of fellowships: expert fellowships, fellowships, and internships. More information can be found here. This is a great chance to not only conduct a research project in the field that you love, but an opportunity to meet with the experts in the field. The application deadline is on the 18th of January.
Tag Archive for 'oer'
The September OCWC webinar is on collaborating with students to generate OCW materials. Many appreciate and value OCW material because it is a production of those who possess the highest form of knowledge in their own respective fields. There are many world renowned scholars who have opened their courses to the public, and they are an inspiration for numerous reasons. While acknowledging their contribution, we must pay close attention to the student collaboration initiative. Students also have good knowledge of their discipline, and for them to collaborate with faculty to produce OCW material gives them a stake in their own learning, and this is significant for various reasons. Instructional specialists stress that a student making a course portfolio via frequent communication with a faculty member enhances learning on the student’s part. OCW project managers stress the cost efficiency involved in producing OCW contents. For my money, it is a great investment for the future. It is always a great investment when we encourage our students to partake in a meaningful activity, think about intellectual property in digital contents, and just get them ready to lead the initiative on OpenCourseWare. Who knows? In a couple years, one of these students could become a faculty member who takes the lead in opening up education.
This month’s speaker is Garin Fons from the University of Michigan. UM’s dScribe team collaborates with graduate students to produce contents for their Open Michigan project. An active member of OCWC, the dScribe team has offered to open OERca, its platform for collaboration to the OCWC community. Come to the webinar to hear about the processes and the system of dScribe. The webinar is on September 3rd at 10AM EDST(GMT-5). You may sign up by emailing meena@ocwconsortium.org.
CCLearn and Open.Michigan are working together to study the ways in which copyright law plays a role in the practices of those who create or help facilitate the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). It is our goal to develop a deeper awareness of the degree to which OER practitioners and users grapple with copyright law issues, and whether those issues pose barriers to the creation, dissemination, and reuse of OER.
We invite you to share your perspectives by taking the OER Copyright Survey and to read more about the study on the Copyright Exceptions and Limitations section of the OpenEd website. The survey should take only 10 - 15 minutes of your time.
If you know of other colleagues - especially individuals outside the U.S., Canada, England, and Australia - who would be interested in participating in this survey, please forward it to them. The survey closes on August 31, so we encourage all to fill it out soon!
If you are one of those people who believe in the power of individuals to create, participate, and contribute to bring forth change in open education, you may want to take into consideration the Talis Incubator for Open Education. This angel fund is for individuals or small groups with projects that cultivate open education, and the proposal submission deadline for the first round of awards is Dec. 31st, 2009. Grant proposals valued from between £1,000 and £15,000 are being solicited. Proposals may either be about creating OER for others to use, software tools for OER, or datasets on OER. Or you may submit a proposal for research that you will present at a conference and use the funding for expenses. Alternatively, you may submit a proposal on open standards for education. In return, Talis asks the grantee to open the results of projects as open source, which will help forward the cause. If you are a small organization or an individual with big ideas on promoting OER, check out the details at http://blogs.talis.com/education.
If you are new to the community or if you are contemplating starting an OCW project within your organization and want to learn more about it, attend our Webinar! If you are an experienced OCW project manager, then participate in the discussion and share your insight with the rest of us. Each month, we have an expert in various fields of OER projects giving a 20-minute-talk. We will follow with an informal discussion on the subject. We hope that sharing the expertise and facilitating more discussion within the community will strengthen our projects and activities.
The schedule for webinars is as follows:
8/6 The New eduCommons (Tom Caswell, OCWC)
Sept. Student generated contents in OCW (Garin Fons, University of Michigan)
Oct. Activities of Opencast (Mara Hancock, UC Berkeley)
Nov. Issues in Intellectual Property (Terri Bays, OCWC)
All webinars are held at 10AM (GMT-5). Please register at www.ocwconsortium.org. Please hurry as positions are limited. Hope to see you there!
On the 14th of July at Macomb Community College in Michigan, President Obama announced the proposal to commit $50 million to develop open online courses for community colleges. This is a part of the American Graduation Initiative which aims at five million additional graduates in the next decade in order to equip the American workforce with a competitive edge in the global economy.
The fact that OER was recognized as an integral part of strengthening education of community colleges makes this announcement a monumental one, especially to those of us who everyday contemplate ways to create more quality course contents carrying Creative Commons license to be used and adopted for free.
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.
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!!
Corona of the Sun During a Solar Eclipse (No known copyright) (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
For those interested, CMU is offering some summer workshops on their OLI approach to OCW.
Check it out if you are interested.
Recent Comments