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On open educational resources -- Beyond definitions. Image by opensource.com Despite the attempts at single sentence definitions so common in the published literature, “open educational resources” is a highly context-mediated construct. However, because philanthropic and public funding agencies commonly require grant outputs to be open educational resources, the ability to quickly and clearly categorize a variety of creative works as “open educational resources” or “not open educational resources” has become critical. Many funding agencies and programs that require OER simply require grantees to apply a Creative Commons license to their grant outputs (e.g., the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the U. S. Department of Labor, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, etc.) in order to meet the “open educational resources” requirement. From a grant or contract compliance standpoint, the operational definition of open educational resources is often collapsed to: Open educational resource, (n).
The Ideal OER 1. POSSE: Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience | a Red Hat community service. [TOS] Announcing the textbook. :) Open*Education: 2011 in review. There is something about a new year that always seems so promising and energizing. It doesn’t seem like too long ago we were saying thank heavens for 2011, and now it’s time to bring in 2012. Before we close this chapter, let’s take a quick look at the ten most popular articles in the education community for 2011, starting with number ten and counting down. 10.
How open source tools can create balanced learning environments 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. One of my personal favorite memories from 2011 was meeting the professors who participated in POSSE 2011 in Raleigh. As we head into 2012, please let me know if you have ideas or feedback for this education community. Best wishes in 2012! Open Text Book. eLearning development approaches, rapid development cycle (RDC), rapid prototyping. This content requires the Adobe Flash Player. <a href=" Flash</a> CMC’s unique Rapid Development Cycle (RDC) is highly innovative and uses an iterative rapid prototyping, modular development and testing process. This approach drastically reduces development time and cost.
Customers are also involved throughout the development cycle, ensuring that the final product meets their unique business needs. Assess project needs CMC will: • Determine learning objectives • Identify content: Existing vs. needs to be developed • Identify modules • Assess technology: Course development (HTML, Flash, Shockwave); Tracking (LMS, database, network); Operating system; Network setup; User rights permission etc Prototype designThe prototype design process rapidly reduces the overall development time and cost by rapidly creating the program’s structure, navigation, look and feel.
Education. Most people think of their interactions with computer systems to occur via a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen. However, humans evolved to interact with thier environment and each other in much more intricate ways. Bridging the gap between the computational systems of the digital world and the natural world is being studied and tested in the Physical Computing course at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany. As a professor of the course, we are currently leveraging a variety of open source software and hardware projects to learn about fundamental core concepts with hands-on experiences and implementation of open source tools.
On the software side, we use an open-source IDE (Arduino Sketch) and develop 3D printer designs using OpenSCAD. On the open source hardware portion of the course, we utilize the Arduinos and the PrintrBot Simple. Webcast recap and recording: MIT OpenCourseWare's past and future. Image by opensource.com This year, MIT OpenCourseWare is celebrating its tenth anniversary. That's one full decade providing open access to more than 2,000 courses with course materials including lecture notes, problem sets, syllabuses, exams, simulations, and the video lectures.
In today's webcast, Cecilia d’Oliveira, executive director of OpenCourseWare, shared the history of OpenCourseWare and its vision for the future. The 2001 decision by the MIT faculty to allow anyone to use their course content was a groundbreaking move, one that has opened education in profound ways. Since then, an estimated 100 million individuals have accessed MIT’s resources. A committee was formed in 2000 to look at how the Internet was going to change education and what MIT was going to do about it. The next proposal was simply to make materials available so that other universities and students could take advantage of them. Why did this happen at MIT, as opposed to anywhere else? Future directions. "Access alone is not enough" Josh Jarrett, Deputy Director of Postsecondary Success at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Image credits: Open Education Conference Josh Jarrett, Deputy Director of Postsecondary Success at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, delivered today's keynote at the Open Education Conference with a simple message (but no simple answer): Access alone is not enough to help people realize their dreams.
The Gates Foundation focuses on education because it is still the "primary arbiter of opportunity in this country," he continued. For many people, if you could change one single factor to change your future, the best thing you could choose would be your mother's education. The correlation between your economic standing and that of your parents lies strongly on their education, far more than race, health status, location, or many other factors. Jarrett offered four challenges for improving education over the next decade: Completion challenge We've done a remarkable job helping more students go to higher education in this country," Jarrett said. "How can openness free the giant? " Freer than free, opener than open: The fight for the learning management systems market is heating up (again)
Image by opensource.com These are exciting times for those who use Learning Management Systems (LMS), applications that help teachers (and students) get a handle on their course materials, grading, and assignments. Currently there are150+ different LMS companies and projects available. And as with any product on its way toward commoditization, someone's disrupting the industry.
That "someone" is textbook publisher Pearson, who announced the availability of OpenClass, an LMS designed for setting up customized courses at the teacher-level. Moodle, you may remember, was the open source underdog for many years. All that's better than going with Blackboard, a heavyweight proprietary vendor. In the wake of the Pearson announcement, Blackboard's at it again, this time partnering with Creative Commons to enable teachers to create and share open educational resources (OERs) through its software. Well, at least they're trying to figure this stuff out, eh? Back to that underdog-turned-champ Moodle. Open education resources: Moving from sharing to adopting. Image by opensource.com Educators have been sharing open educational resources (OERs) for over 12 years now. There are literally tens of thousands of them out there, many structured as collections of course materials known as open courseware (OCW), some structured as complete open courses, some structured as complete open textbooks, and many not really structured at all.
The “sharing ball” is rolling. There are more materials that need to be shared, but the eventual sharing of these materials has now become inevitable. What is anything but inevitable is the adoption of any of these open educational resources. As a thought experiment, pick your favorite institution you believe is committed to open education. Have they ever adopted an open education resource produced at another institution for in-class use? If open education practitioners (both individuals and institutions) cannot move from large-scale sharing to large-scale adopting, the field is dead. General Service List. The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2000 words published by Michael West in 1953.[1] The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was English language learners and ESL teachers.
To maximize the utility of the list, some frequent words that overlapped broadly in meaning with words already on the list were omitted. In the original publication the relative frequencies of various senses of the words were also included. Details[edit] The list is important because a person who knows all the words on the list and their related families would understand approximately 90-95 percent of colloquial speech and 80-85 percent of common written texts. The GSL evolved over several decades before West’s publication in 1953. There are two major updates of the GSL: 1) the New General Service List (new-GSL) by Brezina & Gablasova published in Applied Linguistics in 2013. See also[edit] Notes[edit] LIST_LEARN - Resource Linked Word Lists. What a classroom will look like in 10 years. Technology is rapidly evolving. This evolution is occurring because people are sharing ideas, resources and themselves online 24/7. So what does this mean for our education? Education has long been seen as a vertical un-adaptive to change.
Fifty years ago schools had individual desks, a blackboard in the front of the room and a teacher who administered lessons and testing in accordance to their specific state. Although some schools are slower than others to adapt technology changes, that doesn’t mean others are not jumping in feet first and utilizing the open source way to change education as we know it. Here’s a wish list: Classrooms will be paperlessClassrooms will cater to more individualized instruction based on a student’s passionsCommunication will vastly improveNew learning spaces will pop up – that’s right, no more individual desks And here’s how this will happen because of an open source mentality: Classrooms will be paperless: Communication will vastly improve:
Open Source Physics wins award for online education. Image by opensource.com Open Source Physics is an online curriculum resource, created and edited by a group of college professors, that provides students new ways to understand and predict physical phenomena through computational physics and computer modeling. For students who learn best by exploring and doing versus just reading this is an outstanding resource.
Open Source Physics came to fruition because these professors felt like there was a gap between what students were learning in the classroom and the skills they needed. Unfortunately, such realizations appear to be consistent within education as a whole. The authors note on the site: Computers and computer-based instruction pervade our educational institutions, and much of experimental and theoretical physics cannot be done without the aid of computers. Recently, Open Source Physics won Science magazine's Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE).
Congratulations, Open Source Physics! Academic word list - Simple English Wiktionary. Wiktionary:Academic word list From Wiktionary Jump to: navigation , search Introduction The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington , New Zealand. The list contains 570 word families which were selected because they appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts.
The list does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English (the General Service List ), thus making it specific to academic contexts. The 570 words are divided into 10 sublists. List Sublist 1 Sublist 2 Sublist 3 Sublist 4 Sublist 5 Sublist 6 Sublist 7 Sublist 8 Sublist 9 Sublist 10 Other websites For more information about the AWL, please see Massey University - New Zealand's defining university For more practice with the words from the AWL, please see Retrieved from " Categories : Navigation menu Personal tools Namespaces Variants Views Actions Links Toolbox.
Open source goes to high school. Before heading out to film this story on the Open High School of Utah, I wasn't sure what to expect. I had a lot of the same questions most people would have about an online high school: What kind of students go to high school online? How are teachers building their curriculum from open educational resources and what does it look like? How are the students interacting with their teachers and other students in an online venue?
After spending a day with the founding members, administration, faculty, and a room full of students and their parents, we got answers to all those questions, and left feeling like we were witnessing the beginnings of something phenomenal. Technology rules at Open High where their approach to learning embraces the idea that teaching shouldn't be as static as the textbooks on which it's based. The use of open resources also makes it possible to very easily modify the curriculum to meet student needs. Brigham Young University faculty survey seeks to advance open education through academic libraries. Image by opensource.com Jeff Belliston and Elizabeth Smart from Brigham Young University are working to address the issues facing academic libraries trying to advance open education, beginning with BYU. The Harold B Lee Library at BYU has made several efforts towards this goal. It sponsors ScholarsArchive, an institutional repository for content produced by the university, which houses 2,518 electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs); 1,376 papers, posters, and presentations; and two research collections with nearly 4,000 curated images.
Among other similar initiatives, it has also begun partnering with the Internet Archive to digitize materials from its collection and now has 9,440 complete books available on archive.org. Within this framework, the library began looking where to make further improvements. They conducted a faculty survey and received 510 responses on topics that included publishing support, an open access repository, and open access journal hosting. Survey results. Publican. Publican 4.0.0 released on 18th December 2013. publican is a single source publishing tool based on DocBook XML. publican-fedora is a brand package to restyle your books with a Fedora theme. publican-jboss is a brand package to restyle your books with a JBoss theme. publican-redhat is a brand package to restyle your books with a Red Hat theme. publican-gimp is a brand package for the GIMP project. publican-ovirt is a brand package for the oVirt project.
Mailing List ¶ Archive ¶ Documentation ¶ How to get the source ¶ Submitting Bugs ¶ Submitting Patches ¶ To submit a patch, either add it to Bugzilla, or send it to the official mailing list. The patch should consist of diff files that include: All changes to the source code, both scripts and modules. Translation ¶ The translations projects are located at: Wish List ¶ If you spot documentation using Publican email us! Practical OSS Exploration - Introduction to Free and Open Source Software - Teaching Open Source. eLearning glossary, e-Learning glossary of terms. Inside NYSCATE: Moodle, GIMP, and other open source in education. DocBook.org. Creative Commons - An Overview.