Community College Proves that Schools Don't Need Textbooks. The international foot race is about to begin! Ready… set… wait… none of the Americans are wearing shoes. This is the state of education today. Many students can’t afford textbooks, so they go without, and the entire nation suffers the costs of an under-educated populace. But the open educational resources (OER) movement is picking up speed, and Virginia's Tidewater Community College (TCC) is proving that new models of open education can work.
TCC calls it the Z-Degree program, where the z stands for zero, as in zero textbooks. Launched in Fall 2013, the Z-Degree program uses OER to allow students a 25 percent savings on the first two years of a degree in business administration. Linda Williams, a professor of business administration and project lead, said she’s never claimed that OEM is the best model, but points out that the results they’ve pioneered speak for themselves. “It’s made a huge difference in terms of retention and success with our students,” Williams said.
Resources Search. The History of Music Told in Seven Rapidly Illustrated Minutes. Report on 6 MOOCs turns up 10 surprises. Great report from the University of Edinburgh on their six 2013 Coursera MOOCs. The report has good data, tries to separate out active learners from window shoppers and not short on surprises. It’s a rich resource and a follow up report is promised. Well done Edinburgh – this is in the true spirit of HE – open, transparent and looking to innovate and improve. Six courses Introduction to Philosophy: 98,129 Critical Thinking: 75,884 E-learning & Digital Cultures: 42,844 Astrobiology: 39,556 AI Planning: 29,894 Equine Nutrition: 23,332 Ten surprises Rather than summarise the report, I’ve plucked out the Top Ten surprises, that point towards the future development of MOOCs: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 1.
Good numbers but the report wisely points towards a large number of ‘window shoppers’. 2. Given the level of the courses, it is clear that a wide range of ages want MOOCs. 3. One of the great ‘elephant in the room’ issues in HE is the gender imbalance. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Conclusion. Webinar: What is a MOOC? Free learning resources for teachers | Jorum | jorum.ac.uk. SCORE. 4 is here! Open source is changing the world: join the movement | opensource.com.
The Growing Adoption of Creative Commons Textbooks. Cable Green doesn't have to look very far to find an example of an education system weighed down by what he considers a bloated and inefficient textbook industry. The director of global learning for Creative Commons simply points to his home state of Washington. "My state spends $130 million per year buying textbooks," he says. "We only have a million public school kids in the state, so we're spending $130 per kid per year. " Because each book is expected to last half a decade, the kids aren't permitted to keep them or write in them. The books are only available in one format, paper, and are sometimes seven to 10 years out of date. A superior alternative, he believes, would be easy to execute. [READ: Barnes & Noble's Convoluted Defense of Pricey Books] Under this model, the intellectual property that results from these purchases would be owned by the public. The Creative Commons license celebrated its 10-year anniversary in December.
Why Open Education Matters. Why Pay More Book. Copyright Toolbox. There are nearly as many publishing agreements as there are publishers. Practically every publisher has its own agreement containing the terms and conditions under which it wishes to publish an article. For an author it is sometimes difficult to distill from the agreement the provisions which provide the author the opportunity to have optimal access to the journal article. If the author wants to be sure that he/she retains all the rights needed for optimal access the author could use this Licence to publish. The translations of the Licence to publish are adjusted to the jurisdiction of the countries.
By signing the Licence to publish and sending it to his/her publisher the author grants the publisher a sole licence for certain copyright related acts which have an economic or commercial objective with respect to the article. At the same time the author retains certain rights for various, scholarly purposes. This licence can also be used in the case of multiple authors. Right to Research Coalition. Wolne Lektury Internet library. Dr. Rory McGreal | UNESCO/COL Chair Rory McGreal.
Email: rory@athabascau.ca Professor Rory McGreal is s the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning Chairholder in Open Educational Resources. He is a professor in the Centre for Distance Education at Athabasca University– Canada’s Open University based in Alberta, Canada. He is also the director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI). And, he is a co-Editor of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), and founder of the OER Knowledge Cloud. Formerly, he served as the Associate Vice President Research. He was previously the Executive Director of TeleEducation NB TéléÉducation, a bilingual (French/English) province-wide distance learning network. In this capacity, Rory McGreal’s team implemented the world’s first distance education website, a learning management system and the TeleCampus, a comprehensive learning object metadata database of online courses.
Blog Some publications available here. About the Repository - ROARMAP. OER KnowledgeCloud | Global Education - SD73 Business Company. Campaign to Save Students $1 Billion. Georgia Virtual Learning > Home. MyOpenMath. Image search results. Open Education 2012: Schedule. 5 Reasons Why Educators Should Network. The period of isolationism in the United States ended during World War II, but while political isolation is no more, educational isolation is still prevalent in public schools today.
Many teachers go to school each day, teach their students and leave. If they're struggling with how to teach a lesson that will engage their students, they might ask for advice from the teacher down the hall, but a lot of times, they struggle alone. That's not the case for educators who have built a network of people who share resources, advice and techniques, whether they call it a personal learning network or something else.
Here's why educators should start a personal learning network, or PLN. 1. To learn with others Teachers cannot know everything, so they should learn from one another, said Jerry Blumengarten, who spent 32 years teaching and retired from the New York City Board of Education in 2002. 2. 3. “It’s incredible," cybrary man Blumengarten said. 4. 5. Open Coursewhere. Webinars 2012 Archives « Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. Apr 9 OER Impact Research Faculty and Student Voices Archive and Slides Available March 12 Celebrate Open Education Week Archives and Slides Available, Boyoung Chae and Jen Klaudinyi Archives and Slides Available Natalie Clewell, Cynthia Alexander, and Paul Golisch Archives and Slides Available Donna Gaudet and Quill West Feb 5 Open Textbook Publishing and Adoptions Archive and Slides Available Dec 11 California Community Colleges Share it Forward with CC-BY Archive and Slides Available Nov 13 Fostering Open Policies on Your Campus and Beyond Archive and Slides Available October 30 OER and Open Textbook Adoption and Sustainability Archive and Slides Available October 2 Libraries Lead the Way: Open Courses, OER, and Open Policy Archive and Slides Available.
June 11 Competency-based Learning and OER Archive and Slides Available. April 30 Open Education, MOOCs, and Student Access Archive and slides available. March 26 OER Authoring Tools Archive and slides available. Archive and slides available. Like this: Ed | Subjects.
E-book management. Dashboard | EQUELLA. College Open Textbooks - College Open Textbooks. Home. Overview Management Learning & Teaching Technical Legal JISC/HE Academy UKOER Programme UKOER tweets Going further... Recent changes to the infoKit Cookie statement Last Cookiweek David Kernohan, a JISC Programme Manager, commented in a Guardian article last week that Open Educational Resources are a radical idea that has now become mainstream.
To try and condense some of the vast amount that has been learnt about the benefits of OER releases in the past 10 years, the Higher Education Academy and JISC have developed an InfoKit. (David Kernohan) As David mentions, one section that was missing up until now is a section giving an overview of Open Educational Resources for Senior Managers. . · OER infoKit >>> Senior Management Overview >>> Menu If you're a Senior Manager - or even if you're not - we'd love some feedback! Make Textbooks Affordable | Student PIRGs. Everyone knows that textbooks prices are outrageous. Students spend an average of $1,200 a year on textbooks and course materials, and prices have been rising more than for times the rate of inflation for the past two decades! It’s no accident that textbooks are so expensive. Publishing companies are raking in huge profits while engaging in bad practices that drive up costs: issuing new editions that make used books hard to find, bundling textbooks with unnecessary CDs and pass-codes, and more.
They get away with it because students don’t have a choice -- we’ve got to buy the book they’re selling, even if the price is outrageous. The good news is that we're making progress. Students can save hundreds through discounted options like renting, used books and bookswaps on campus. The real momentum comes from lasting solutions like open-source textbooks, which could literally revolutionize the textbook market by offering free online access and reducing costs up to 80%. QUESTIONS? University of Minnesota. CREATIVE COMMONS--HOW TO MARK ITEMS. You have chosen a CC license for your work. Now how do you go about letting the world know?
Here are some examples of how to mark your work with the CC license. Note: If you want to know how to attribute other creators' CC licensed materials, go here. How to use the CC License Chooser You can easily add a CC license notice to your website by visiting the CC license chooser. At the chooser, simply answer a few questions, fill in the fields you need, and receive an already formatted HTML code. At this point, all you have to do is: 1. The specifics of inserting the code depend on how you edit your website. If all of the resources you are publishing on a single website are licensed under the same CC license, it makes sense to paste the HTML code into your website’s template (e.g., in a footer or sidebar area). 2.
For example, if you select CC BY in the chooser, the default text you receive in the second line of html code is: Example: Website Author? License? Machine-readability? Example: Blog. Finding OER. 3 Major Publishers Sue Open-Education Textbook Start-Up - Wired Campus. Open-education resources have been hailed as a trove of freely available information that can be used to build textbooks at virtually no cost.
But a copyright lawsuit filed last month presents a potential roadblock for the burgeoning movement. A group of three large academic publishers has sued the start-up Boundless Learning in federal court, alleging that the young company, which produces open-education alternatives to printed textbooks, has stolen the creative expression of their authors and editors, violating their intellectual-property rights. The publishers Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education filed their joint complaint last month in the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of New York. The publishers’ complaint takes issue with the way the upstart produces its open-education textbooks, which Boundless bills as free substitutes for expensive printed material. “They’re wrongfully claiming ownership of open knowledge,” he said. Publisher Complaint. Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. About The Licenses. Our public copyright licenses incorporate a unique and innovative “three-layer” design. Each license begins as a traditional legal tool, in the kind of language and text formats that most lawyers know and love. We call this the Legal Code layer of each license. But since most creators, educators, and scientists are not in fact lawyers, we also make the licenses available in a format that normal people can read — the Commons Deed (also known as the “human readable” version of the license).
The Commons Deed is a handy reference for licensors and licensees, summarizing and expressing some of the most important terms and conditions. The final layer of the license design recognizes that software, from search engines to office productivity to music editing, plays an enormous role in the creation, copying, discovery, and distribution of works. Searching for open content is an important function enabled by our approach.
OER Commons. OERs: the good, the bad and the ugly.
UDL. Web. The Team - SCORE. Meet the SCORE team Jonathan Darby Director, Higher Education Shared Solutions As Academic Director of SCORE Jonathan leads the project and promotes Open Education Resources nationwide. The other half of his job involves co-ordinating the Shared Solutions programme and disseminating its outcomes. Tracey de Beer Communications Manager, SCORE Tracey manages communications, the fellowship programme and events within SCORE. Janet Dyson Project Assistant for SCORE Janet provides administrative support for the fellowship programme and events, sending news and updates via social media as well as updating the SCORE web-site. Beatriz de los Arcos Community Support Consultant Bea joined the SCORE team in the summer of 2010 primarily to provide support and advice around the creation of OER within the Open University's LabSpace.
Tracy Everard Team Co-ordinator & PA to the Director of SCORE Andy Lane Senior SCORE Fellow Tim Seal Assistant Director, SCORE. Duncan Calls for Urgency in Lowering College Costs. The characterized Mr. Duncan’s remarks, at a Las Vegas conference of college financial aid workers, as the start of a “national conversation” about high costs, which have prompted raucous protests across the country and ignited an angry push among some borrowers demanding debt forgiveness, federal grants and interest-free loans. The department used the opportunity to call attention to steps the Obama administration had taken to reduce the net price that students and families pay for higher education and make it easier to repay .
But it was clear that the administration was taking heed of the rising furor over tuition increases, and a growing online debate about how much a college degree is worth at a time when few jobs are available for graduates. “Three in four Americans now say that college is too expensive for most people to afford,” Mr. Duncan said. College seniors with loans now graduate with an average debt load of more than $25,000. Even as college has become more expensive, Mr.