Monthly Archives: October 2009

University President Remarks on Open Learning

Posted on October 21, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Ferdinand von Prondzynski, President of Dublin City University, has a new post on open learning. Von Prondzynski points to iTunes U and wonders what the future role of it may be. While there have been several introductory articles to open education within the past few weeks (such as this introductory one at The Independent), it is interesting to see a university president paying attention. From the post:

Could this be a platform for online accredited education, so that while today you may just be availing of interesting information and knowledge here, tomorrow you may be using this platform to get a BA (or whatever) degree. [sic]

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11 Open Source Flash Alternatives

Posted on October 21, 2009 by | Leave a comment

The blog Open Source Applications has posted a list of 11 open source alternatives to Adobe’s Flash environment. From the post:

…small developers from poorer countries cannot afford expensive licenses for flash. But, they do have excellent opensource alternatives for developing flash content .

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Open Access Week Begins

Posted on October 19, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Open Access Week begins today. Gavin Baker at Open Access News has a list of activities this week. If readers are aware of any other open access activities this week, they should leave a comment on this blog, or add to the wiki.

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CNN World Business Covers Open Education

Posted on October 19, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Mark Tutton at CNN World Business wrote an article on open education. Projects highlighted include iTunes U, MIT OCW and OCW Consortium. From the article:

But it’s iTunes U that’s generating the most interest. The University of Oxford says there have been more than one million downloads from its iTunes U site, while Stanford University says its course on creating iPhone applications was downloaded more than one million times in just seven weeks.

Thanks to Alastair Creelman for the link.

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Details on $500 Million for OER

Posted on October 19, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Jonathan Lopez has tweeted on the availability of details surrounding the $500 million pledged by the Obama administration to open educational resources. From the article:

The Secretary [U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan] envisions that colleges and universities would decide whether to grant college credit to students who exhibit “mastery” of the course content and skills. There could be proctored testing centers available to accelerate and accommodate student learning. Professors could use all or only part of the content of these courses in their own classes, says the Secretary, and the Department of Defense would have similar options for use in their classes for military personnel.

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More Defense of $500 Million OER Spending Measure

Posted on October 19, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Last week OEN reported on Bill Tucker’s defense of the $500 million spending measure. Now Gunnar Hellekson (Lead Architect for Red Hat Government) has a post defending the measure as well. From the post:

It’s not at all clear that funding the development of freely available content will crowd out the existing publishers. There is certainly a threat to content publishers if their business model is predicated on controlling access to content. But whether they realize it or not, vendors of textbooks and distance learning programs are selling much more than just content. They’re adding value through packaging, supplementary materials, and either an implicit or explicit certification process. They’re already competing, after a fashion, with programs like MIT’s OpenCourseWare and Open Yale Courses.

Thanks to Antonio Salazar for the link.

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Discussion on Institutional vs. Networked Learning

Posted on October 19, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Tom Worthington and Leigh Blackall have each posted with regards to institutional vs. networked learning. The catalyst for the conversation was a presentation Worthington gave for forum called “Gaggle.” From Blackall’s post:

Do the institutions really provide effective guidance and quality, or are they simply enjoying a governed monopoly over the idea? Many parallels have been made here with recent challenges facing newspapers and journalism – one being the institution, the other being the social value it keeps. What happens when that social value is more effectively found (or realised) in places outside that institution?

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Best Practices in Fair Use of OpenCourseWare

Posted on October 16, 2009 by | Leave a comment

“Sarahwalch” has tweeted about the “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare.” As the title implies, the document covers fair use application to OCW. Notable authors on the document include Terri Bays, Ira Gooding, Garin Fons and many more.

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Open Access “Inevitable”

Posted on October 16, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Jennifer Howard at The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Wired Campus has a new article reporting on a membership meeting of the Association of Research Libraries. According to Howard, participants were told that open access was “inevitable,” though adoption at individual institutions takes time. From the article:

…many scholars need the hard sell from colleagues and librarians about the benefits of open access. Lorraine J. Haricombe, dean of the University of Kansas Libraries, described the “foot soldiering” and outreach that had to be done before Kansas’s faculty passed an open-access resolution earlier this year.

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Open University’s Approach to Plagiarism

Posted on October 16, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Tim Hunt has a new post discussing efforts to fight plagiarism at the Open University. Hunt suggests that anti-plagiarism efforts need to be integrated throughout a course of study, rather than solved through technological means or afterthought lecture. From the post:

The real problem with plagiarism is that it breaks the link between what the student submits for assessment, what they have learned. If a student writes something in their own words, then that writing is good evidence of the extent to which they have taken in the ideas of a course. If they have just copied and pasted someone else’s words, you cannot assess what they have learned.

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