Linda K. Wertheimer at The Boston Globe has an article highlighted interesting OCW courses. Courses include Blender Design at Tufts University and Philosophy 176: Death. From the article:
You get neither course credit nor feedback, and following along can require some patience. But the pluses are many: career exploration, a test of college readiness, and sheer entertainment. And, of course, no bill from the registrar.
Thanks to Steve Carson for the link.
Nate Anderson at Arstechnica is reporting that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has produced lessons about copyright at Techingcopyright.org (licensed CC-BY). Anderson points out that while the content aims for an unbiased opinion, it still leans to a pro-P2P, pro-Creative Commons bias. From Teachingcopyright.org’s “About” page:
…when we surveyed existing digital education resources related to copyright, we were dismayed to find that much of the available material relied on inaccurate generalizations about technology and law. Rather than presenting unbiased facts and encouraging inquiry, the materials focused on drilling students on the prohibitions of copyright. As avid users of technology ourselves, we could not stand by and let this educational opportunity become an excuse to scare young people away from making full and fair use of the digital technologies that will continue to affect virtually every aspect of their lives.
Anna at the NECC Ning page reminds readers that there will be an “open source playground” at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC 2009). The conference runs Jun. 28 – Jul. 1 in Washington, DC. From NECC’s “Lounges and Playgrounds” page:
Explore stations that feature K12LTSP thin-clients and a wide range of free software including Linux, GIMP, OpenOffice, Mysql, Firefox, Moodle, and more.
Coordinator: Steve Hargadon, CoSN/EdTechLive
Posted in Open Education
Tagged conference, education, K-12, Open Education, open source
Karen Fasimpaur has a new blog post discussing a concept paper for funding K-12 OER with stimulus money. Fasimpaur is looking for others who would be interested in collaborating on the project. From the concept paper:
The final key to this challenge [lack of student engagement] is assembling a wide collection of engaging, relevant, and diverse learning resources. Textbooks clearly do not meet this need. Commercial electronic resources are engaging and high quality, but can be very expensive and do not generally allow for customization due to copyright restrictions. An alternative is open resources: high quality, digital, multimedia resources that are open licensed, freely sharable, and remixable. This allows teachers and learners to use them in a variety of forms and combinations to maximize learning potential.
Hugh Davis and Leslie Carr will be publishing an article on the “culture of sharing” and OER in an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. The article focuses on two repositories, EdShare and Language Box, and how they fostering sharing. From the abstract:
EdShare and the Language Box are two initiatives that have concentrated on the issue of facilitating and improving the practice of sharing, the former in an institutional setting and the latter in a subject community of practice. This paper describes and analyses the motivations for these projects, the design decisions they took in implementing their repositories, the approaches they took to change agency and practice within their communities, and the changes in practice that have so far been observed. The contribution of this paper is an improved understanding of how to encourage educational communities to share.
Via Su White’s blog, ShirleyKnot.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged e-learning, higher education, library, oer, Open Education
Since Wikipedia is migrating to a Creative Commons license (reported last week by OEN), Mike Linksvayer at Creative Commons is encouraging other GFDL-licensed wikis to migrate by August 1st. Linksvayer notes that Wikimedia has created an “outreach” page for GFDL-licensed wikis. From the blog post:
Ideally all works under free (as in freedom) licenses should be freely remixable, greatly increasing the pull of the Free universe. Wikipedia’s adoption of CC BY-SA goes a long way toward that goal, and each additional wiki that can migrate by the deadline helps even more.
Posted in Open Education
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Open Education News Team
Posted in Open Education
I got this by email, I thought important to share this here:
UN announces launch of world’s first tuition-free, online university
A leading arm of the United Nations working to spread the benefits of information technology announced last week the launch of the first ever tuition-free online university. As part of this year’s focus on education, the UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) presented the newly formed University of the People, a non-profit institution offering higher education to the masses.
“This year the Global Alliance has focused its attention on education [and] on how ICT can advance education goals around the world,” Serge Kapto from GAID told a press conference at UN Headquarters in New York.
For hundreds of millions of people around the world higher education is no more than a dream, Shai Reshef, the founder of the University of the People, told reporters. They are constrained by finances, the lack of institutions in their region, or they are not able to leave home to study at a university for personal reasons.
Mr Reshef said that this University opened the gate to these people to continue their studies from home and at minimal cost by using open-source technology, open course materials, e-learning methods and peer-to-peer teaching.
Admission opened just over two weeks ago; and without any promotion some 200 students from 52 countries have already registered, with a high school diploma and a sufficient level of English as entry requirements.
Students will be placed in classes of 20, after which they can log on to a weekly lecture, discuss its themes with their peers and take a test – all online. There are voluntary professors, post-graduate students and students in other classes who can also offer advice and consultation.
The only charge to students is a $15 to $50 admission fee, depending on their country of origin, and a processing fee for every test ranging from $10 to $100. For the University to sustain its operation, it needs 15,000 students and $6 million, of which Mr Reshef has donated $1 million of his own money.
Steve Carson has posted a reply to David Wiley’s assertion that OCW’s will need to offer credit by 2012, or face elimination (reported by OEN last week). Carson is skeptical of Wiley’s points, asserting that OCW can capitalize on other strengths, such as marketing. From the blog post:
MIT came to the OCW concept in part because the market fundamentals in distance learning didn’t seem to favor MIT. Those fundamentals still apply. Will MIT OpenCourseWare need to be sustainable in 2012? Undoubtedly. Will it be so through distance learning? I’m not holding my breath.
Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb is reporting that Yahoo! has added the ability to search images by Creative Commons license. Lardinois asserts that Yahoo!’s Creative Commons search interface is much easier than Flickr’s. From the article:
Flickr’s own search interface is relatively clunky compared to Yahoo Image Search and the filter settings on Flickr are hidden behind the advanced search feature which only appears after you have initiated a regular search. While this is also true for Yahoo Image Search, Yahoo remembers your settings between search sessions, which is quite a time-saver.
Story also available through the Creative Commons site.
