Tag Archives: accessibility

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.

Inclusive OER Design

Cynthia Curry has a new post discussing accessibility and open educational resources. Curry asks how designers can shape OER to include as many learners as possible. From the post:

“What does all of this mean for teachers and students who want, need, and should take advantage of high quality, effective, and meaningful OERs?” As consumers of OERs, what influence can we have on their design? As creators of OERs, how can we adopt a model for accomplishing inclusive design?

Accessible Textbooks for Higher Education

Ron Graham has a new post about two services for accessible textbooks: The AccessText Network and Texas Text Exchange (TTE). Both of these services involve digitizing textbooks and sharing them with others. From the post:

As a former blind college student, I know the value of, and appreciate, having accessible textbooks.