Monthly Archives: October 2009

New materials from the UNESCO OER community

Two interesting resources were launched recently by members of the UNESCO OER international community.

A OER toolkit authored by Philipp Schmidt and a new report about Access2OER. Two were already the outcomes of the discussion around ACCESS2OER. As reported by Bjoern Hassler.

The first proposal is about “Introducing digital Open Educational Resources into Zambian primary schools through school-based professional development”. Through this project we seek to overcome access barriers, and engage with OER for Zambian primary/secondary school mathematics teaching. The barriers are manifold, including infrastructural, awareness, appropriateness of materials, etc, but we hope that we’ll be able to draw on the various experiences and solutions to make this successful.

The project has a small amount of funding, which we will use to engage with teachers in Zambia in Spring 2010. The “we” here is a North-South partnership, which of course includes various partners in Zambia. The outcomes of the project will be reported at eLearning Africa (May 2010, Lusaka). Further information is available here.

The second outcome is continued engagement through the UK National Commission for UNESCO. Within the Information Society Working Group, OER has been a long-standing theme. However, based on the experience of the discussion, we are now focussing on issues around OER access and collaboration. The aims for this are concrete: We are running a series of meetings to further focus on feasible projects in this area.
The first meeting will take place on 25th/26th in conjunction with the Nottingham Open Learning Conference and in conjunction with OER Africa.

Faculty Attitudes Towards Open Textbooks

Diane Harley, along with others, at the Center for Studies in Higher Education have published a paper on faculty attitudes towards open textbooks. The researchers found that faculty valued the flexibility of open textbooks, but found that there was insufficient number for widespread adoption. From the abstract:

A single, predetermined solution (e.g.,“open textbooks” or “open educational resources”) and such jargon may very well work against the OER movement and faculty’s willingness to explore new options. Finally, we strongly recommend that a wide range of faculty (and student) input be considered essential to any conversation about the future of textbook affordability.

Thanks to Cable Green for the link.

Google Book Settlement News 10/21/2009

Juliet Ye at the Wall Street Journal China Journal blog has a new post on China’s reaction to the Google Book settlement. Organizations within China are opposed to the effort, and suggest that their rights are under attack. From the post:

Google introduced its digital library to China in 2007, but most Chinese writers are still not familiar with the service. According to a critical report aired last week by state broadcaster CCTV, Google has converted to digital format and published nearly 18,000 books written by more than 570 Chinese writers, most of whom are unaware of the move.

Call for Yale to Open Up

Adi Kamdar has an article in the Yale Daily News calling for Yale to participate in open education/open access initiatives. Kamdar believes that Yale is lagging in its efforts in comparison to Harvard and MIT. From the article:

But openness at Yale is not unprecedented. The University has already started embracing the democratizing, educational nature of the Internet with its Open Yale Courses initiative; however, this isn’t enough.

Open Access Week Links

As a reminder, this week is Open Access Week. A few links about ongoing activities:

The Depot Repository Launches

Stephen Downes notes the launch of the Depot, a repository for peer-reviewed e-prints. The Depot is funded by JISC. From the “About” page:

The purpose of the Depot is to enable all academics worldwide to share in the benefits of open access exposure for their research outputs. The Depot is provided as an international facility geared to support the policies of universities and national funding agencies towards Open Access, aiding policy development in advance of a comprehensive institutional archive network.

List of Recorded Lecture Sites

Donald Clark has a new post providing a list of websites that provide recorded lectures. Clark lists many projects familiar to persons in open education such as YouTube EDU and iTunes U. From the post:

Suddenly a huge amount of good content is available on the web, for free, as some of the biggest brands on the web act as conduits for higher education content, with hefty foundation grants paying the bill.

Thanks to Donna Benjamin for the link.

Cheap Models of Open Education

Joshua Kim at InsideHigherEd has a new post contrasting more student-centered, cheaper models of open education with OCW. The article was written as a response to a recent one on open education published by The Chronicle of Higher Education (reported by OEN). From the article:

While admirable and wonderful and brilliant, I’d argue that most institutions should not replicate M.I.T.’s (or Yale’s) model of providing open courses. These online courses do wonderful things for the greater learning community, and are terrific for alumni relations and recruiting prospective students, but we have other models for open learning.

Thanks to Jon Mott for the link.

IssueLab Issues Remix Challenge

Jane Park at Creative Commons is reporting that IssueLab, an open source archive for research, is starting a video remix contest. Rules are available at IssueLab. From the rules:

We prefer one minute pieces but will accept all submissions under three minutes.

GLOBE Advocates OER

Garry Putland has a new post announcing GLOBE’s support of OER. GLOBE is an international alliance of repositories. From the post:

The group confirmed that it will continue to connect repositories of learning content to create a critical mass of quality learning content from around the world. The group now has a number of OER repositories that will enrich the pool of resources with open content.

Commentary by Stephen Downes.
Note: The article originally switched Garry Putland’s first and last name. OEN regrets the error.