Brian Lamb presented as the keynote speaker of the Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange 2009 (TTIX) today on “The Urgency of Open Education.” The presentation outline can be found on Brian’s website and the video is available at Ustream. Lamb shared this thought, along many others:
I like technologies that are fast, cheap, and out of control.
McU Media blog has linked to Wes Fryer’s presentation “Copyright for Educators.” From the blog post:
This is an excellent presentation about Copyright and Creative Commons, which caused me to rethink my usual several-times-a-year pep talk about copyright and far use. I’m usually not a negative person, so why was this particular presentation always about the “don’ts” and never about the “you can do these really great things”?
Posted in Open Education
Tagged copy right, copyright, creative commons, education, fair use, presentation
The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources is announcing three presentations about OER in the next six months. The presentations will be presented at the Etudes Summit, Online Teaching Conference and MERLOT conference.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged education, event, higher education, oer, open textbooks, presentation
The SPARC Videoblog has posted a video of David Wiley presenting a brief introduction to Open Educational Resources to the SPARC-ACRL Forum in January. The presentation is only fifteen minutes long and is also available on Vimeo.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged higher education, oer, Open Education, openness, presentation, SPARC
Recently Professor Jim Slotta and Stian Haklev presented for OISE on “Open Education Around the World,” which highlighted various initiatives from around the world. Links used in the presentation can be found on Haklev’s blog. A copy of the slides is also available on Slideshare. Stephen Downes, through Stephen’s Web, remarked on the presentation:
The talk introduces (for me) the phrase “accidental OER”, which seems to refer to thinks that are not ‘repositories’, properly so-called, and includes museum displays, digital libraries, open journals, and the like. The contrast is with “intentional OER”, which includes initiatives such as OpenCourseWare. There’s also discussion of open videos and open textbooks.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged education, higher education, oer, Open Education, openness, presentation
The Hewlett Foundation recently completed its annual conference on Open Educational Resources in Monterey, California. As part of the conference attendees used a new website, Cloudworks. Cloudworks allows users to create “Clouds” or an organization of media, links, comments etc. on a particular topic. It is funded by the Open University and JISC. The site is in its early stages and is built on Drupal, an open-source CMS. More from Patrick McAndrew at his blog OCHRE:
The aim was to create a conference experience that persists and it delivered: there is now a great collection of comments, clouds, interviews and feedback on cloudworks for the OER Meeting, Monterey discussions.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged conference, event, oer, Open Education, openness, presentation
Text and images from Brian Lamb’s keynote at the ITC 2009 e-Learning conference are now available at Open Up! Brian highlights the disruptions music, book, and TV industries have faced in recent years. He stresses the DIY reuse and remix that are hallmarks of his keynotes, and says:
” We’ve been too busy trying to dictate the experience, build walls and obsessing over the gates instead of the experience.”
(Thanks to Jared Stein at Flexknowlogy.)
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged oer, Open Education, open learning, openness, presentation
CCCOER drew attention to Susan Dean’s presentation entitled “The textbook is…free? Open Educational Resources” at the California Math Council Community Colleges (CMC3) 36th Annual Fall Conference in December 2008.
EDUCASE issued a call for presentation proposals for its upcoming EDUCASE 2009 Conference to be held in Denver, November 3–6.
What makes the EDUCAUSE Annual Conferences so strong and so valuable is that attendees share experiences, ideas, and information with colleagues, and we all learn from each other. We urge you to share what you have learned and make the conference even stronger by submitting a proposal for a presentation. Consider organizing a panel discussion or submitting a joint presentation with a colleague. The program committee has outlined a series of tracks and topics they believe will make an interesting and useful program. These tracks fall within the greater EDUCAUSE areas of focus, which are:
- Teaching and Learning: Using information technology to improve access to teaching and learning, learning effectiveness, student success, and learning outcomes
- E-Research and E-Scholarship: Developing techniques for using information technology to speed research, discovery, and innovation, as well as to enable collaborative intelligence and virtual organizations
- Evolving Role of IT and Leadership: Exploring and monitoring changes in information technology and their relation to corresponding shifts in the expectations and responsibilities of IT professionals and leaders in higher education
- Managing the Enterprise: Helping EDUCAUSE members ensure that their institutions are managed efficiently and effectively and that information technology supports institutional priorities
Lorna, via Lorna’s JISC CETIS blog, shared summaries of the presentations delivered at the Open Educational Resources session at CETIS08. Snippet:
Overview of JISC Open Educational Content Programme
- David Kernohan, JISCThe session opened with a presentation by David outlining the rationale behind this call which is both timely, the OER movement is making real progress worldwide, and opportunistic, the money just happens to be available right now. David also pointed out that HEI business models have changed significantly in recent years as a result of the information explosion. Institutions are no longer the sole repositories of information and knowledge. Information is now ubiquitously availably through multiple channels, not least the Internet. However there is a difference between accessing information and developing learning and understanding and this is where HEIs still have a key role to play.
David acknowledged that there are still considerable barriers to reusing educational content not least of which is IPR. However JISC are not intending to use this call to fund and develop a license structure, rather it is intended to support institutions to develop a process for licensing- whether that be CC or any other type of licence that enables open access to content. Buying licenses is not a sustainable model, changing practice is.
Clearly there is still a risk that institutions and individuals will balk at the idea of “giving away” resources with potential value during a time of recession. However they need to realise that the potential value of new students and enhanced institutional and individual reputation is potentially of greater value than that of the content. This point was neatly illustrated by Patrick McAndrew’s impromptu presentation which included real evidence of the benefit to the OU of the Hewlett funded Open Learn project.
So while the immediate aim of this call is the online release of existing UK HE learning content licensed for worldwide open use and repurposing the real goal of this programme is to help institutions develop processes and policies that result in sustainable open access to content.
(As this programme is currently at the policy in development stage David’s presentation will not be circulated until the call is released. )
Technical Infrastructure for Open Educational Content
- Amber Thomas, JISCNext up was Amber who outlined the technical infrastructure approach that JISC are proposing for the OER Programme. Rather than mandating the use of Institutional Repositories and specific licenses, standards and application profiles a more lightweight approach to technical infrastructure is being explored. Content may be released anywhere, in any format, under any appropriately open license however the onus will be on the individual projects to ensure that their content is discoverable, accessible, reusable, attributable, copyright cleared, openly available and supported by stable URIs and a minimum set of tags.
To balance this “anything goes” approach there will also be a centralised aggregation of content in JorumOpen. However at this stage it is yet to be decided whether this means all content must be deposited in JorumOpen or linked there. This aggregation of content will enable JISC and HEFCE to showcase the outputs of the programme and will hopefully also provide the potential to build rich services on the aggregated resources
This is a relatively new approach to programme infrastructure and there is still much to be discussed and decided, in particular what constitutes the minimal technical requirements for tagging and persistent identifiers.
The trick here is to balance openness with consistency. The programme will attempt to stitch together an infrastructure based on existing workflows, commonly used tools and the services that can be built around them. It’s not just about the content but the role of content in social networks and it’s not about forcing change but about supporting those that already want to change.
Open Educational Resources – Opportunities and Challenges for HE
- Li Yuan, CETISThe final scheduled presentation of the session was from CETIS own Li who presented a summary of her whitepaper Open Educational Resources – Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education.
Good intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials
- Peter Douglas, IntrallectThis study, which will be reporting shortly, focuses on the business case for sharing e-learning materials, sustainability and levels of openness. The study reports that many projects that started in or around 2002 had very similar aims to the current OER programme but ultimately haven’t been very successful. Understandably it has been difficult to learn why these initiatives failed as institutions are unwilling to publicise their lack of success. Traditionally institutional business models and IPR policies are developed by enterprise/knowledge transfer departments, which are often driven by rather more commercial ideology than academic departments. However it appear that many institutions are currently in the process of transitioning these business models. The impact of this transition remains to be seen.
OU OpenLearn and OLNet
- Patrick McAndrew, Open UniversityOpenLearn has had considerable impact on the Open University, this is measurable in terms of bringing students into the institution. An estimated 7000 registrations are a direct result of OpenLearn and it is 5th on the list of reasons why people come to the OU. OpenLearn is aimed at primarily at learners rather than other educators, content is the attractor, but the push is for education.
The OU has also set up a range of low-level partnerships based on OpenLearn, this was not a predicted outcome of the project, it’s a whole new approach to collaboration. Initially the OU found it was surprisingly hard to convince people that Openlearn materials were actually free and somewhat surprisingly there has been little demand for OpenLearn content from the JISC RePRODUCE projects.
OER is about giving permission in advance for things that otherwise have to be negotiated and therefore might never happen. It’s about “you act openly, we act openly, let’s collaborate”. However things take time, open collaboration really scales up the time element, it’s impossible to realistically measure impact over a one year period in any sensible way.
The OU and Carnegie Mellon University have now received additional funding from the Hewlett Foundation for OLNet – a network to support sharing methodologies and evidence on the effectiveness of OERs. This next wave is about impact, evidence and effectiveness.
