Open Educational Resources (OER): Resource Roundup Resources by Topic: OER, a part of the global open content movement, are shared teaching, learning, and research resources available under legally recognized open licenses -- free for people to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. Why are OER important? High-quality OER can save teachers significant time and effort on resource development and advance student learning inside and outside the classroom. Further, open sharing of resources has the potential to fuel collaboration, encourage the improvement of available materials, and aid in the dissemination of best practices. Getting Started Sharing Resources The nonprofit Creative Commons offers free, easy-to-use copyright licenses that allow you to specify which rights to your works you want to reserve and which rights you'd like to waive. Quality Considerations With all the promise of OER, some challenges remain. Back to Top How to Find OER Open Lesson Plans, Courses, and Activities Open Alternatives to Textbooks
Why Open Educational Resources? - Article - SURFspace SURFspace vraagt jouw toestemming om cookies te gebruiken In afwachting van de verwachte wijziging van de Telecomwet hanteert SURFspace deze cookiemelding om aan de wet te voldoen. Zodra de Telecomwet gewijzigd is zal SURFspace de cookiemelding aanpassen. Over cookies Een cookie is een bestandje met informatie die op jouw computer wordt geplaatst en welke bij een volgend bezoek weer wordt gelezen. Veelgestelde vragen over de cookiewet SURFspace gebruikt cookies voor: het onthouden van instellingen en voorkeuren. het tonen van inhoud van externe partijen zoals video’s, presentaties en audiobestanden. Zonder jouw toestemming kun je deze site niet gebruiken.
Open Educational Resources at The Open University The Open University (OU) is a world leader in the development of Open Educational Resources (OER) and several prominent projects have emerged in recent years reflecting our work in this groundbreaking new field of Education. This website is a portal to all the Open University OER projects, current and complete, to showcase our research and good practice which takes place at the University and to link to our own OER output. We aim to provide a coherent view of OER activity at the OU for our staff, our students and the world. Developing learners with OU OER The OU now ensures it provides around 5% of its course materials as free open educational content every year. There have been over 22 million visitors since launch in 2006 There is around 12,000 hours of study materials in 12 subject areas Content includes: 631 study units, educational interactives, topical videos, academic blogs, direct access to OU podcasts and opportunities to order free printed materials
Open-source textbooks gain in push for affordability STORRS, Conn. — The standard textbook for Fundamentals of General Chemistry I at the University of Connecticut has a list price of $303. For students who use the version professor Edward Neth is preparing for the fall semester, the cost will be zero. An early adopter of open source textbooks, Neth said he turned to the new technology out of frustration with spiraling prices of commercial textbooks. “It’s seeing the costs go up every semester and almost feeling powerless,” Neth said. Universities and state governments are lining up behind the cause as a way to make college more affordable. The movement has made rapid gains over the past year, often driven by students, such as UConn activists who sparked a campaign that led to state legislation last year endorsing open-source materials. But commercial texts won’t go the way of chalkboards anytime soon. The driving concern has been costs so high that many students report skipping some book purchases.
The dirty little secret of online learning: Students are bored and dropping out Online education has been around for a long time. But massive open online courses are finally making it respectable. Maybe even cool. Let’s not forget, though, that they are still experiments. Hundreds of courses are now available from dozens of the world’s best universities and professors. So far, though, online courses are not building a massively better-skilled workforce. Sure, a few free, open, online courses have generated eye-popping registration numbers, upwards of 200,000 in some cases. Not So Massive After All So why are all these students falling asleep, virtually, in their digital classes? Another big issue, especially for non-traditional students, is that learning has to fit in between life and work. To be fair, there’s always going to be dropouts when learning is voluntary. Fortunately, we won’t have to wait long because a lot of smart people are already putting a lot of thought, work and money into making them better. Let’s start with mobile first.
Google Rubrics for Assignments in Online Courses - Online Education Blog of Touro College An important aspect of an online course is grading assignments and providing feedback. This is especially true in an asynchronous course where there is no real-time interaction between the instructors and students. Once a student completes a learning activity, the instructor teaches via the grading of the assignment and provides clear and helpful feedback to the student. A rubric is one of the most popular grading and assessment tools. Here are five benefits to having rubrics as a central part of an online course: Goals – Due to the lack of external motivation in an asynchronous course, it is important for students to have established goals in order to remain motivated. Here are three great online resources to assist you in making rubrics for your online class: RubiStar – This is a free online tool which allows you to customize rubrics for any course or assignment. Sources: Rubrics – More than Just Assessment by Dr. Grading and Performance Rubrics by Carnegie Mellon University
Imaginary Digital Skills Course – #h817open- Week 2-Activity 8 | Reflections on Learning image credit: Alice Mini-Series TV Show (2009) #h817open -Week 2- Activity 8 Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners (e.g. undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, etc.). It is a short, online course aimed at providing these learners with a set of resources for developing ‘digital skills’. It runs for five weeks, with a different subject each week, accounting for about six hours study per week. Using these OER repositories to find OERS: MERLOTJorumAriadneMITOpenLearnRice Connexions The Journey of Building an Imaginary OER courseI did find a few OERs that looked promising for this imaginary course. I did find a course or two on MIT OCW that helped me find links to resources I could use. I did see many good resources that I could possibly use for other courses, but would I be able to find them again when I needed them? My Imaginary Digital Skills Course Resources: What is a
How Open Access and Para-Academic Publishers Are Disrupting Academic Publishing Digital disruption has happened in almost every publishing sector except one: academic publishing. The reasons why academic publishers have resisted changes as other sectors have gone digital is complex, and many have tried to change aspects of academic publishing with few results. For example, In 2011, GigaOm author Mathew Ingram explained that one of the reasons why academic publishing is so resistant to change is because universities “pay large sums to subscribe to those journals, they often feel compelled to justify those costs by requiring that all research be published through them” (“So When Does Academic Publishing Get Disrupted?”). Here in 2013, not much has changed in traditional academic publishing, but there are changes happening on the edges of academic publishing. Some of these alternative methods for producing scholarly work have adopted the term “para-academic” to distinguish their work as happening outside of the academic publishing system. Related Posts:
Learnadoodledastic: Making a case for creating Open Educational Resources for use in Higher Education To set the scene we'll start with a useful and pragmatic definition of Open Educational Resources from Stephen Downes (although he does not support the idea of an 'official' definition) – Read more here "Open educational resources are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone." Background Inspiration for this post was attendance at the one day MEDEV workshop From curiosity to confidence: sharing what it takes to ‘go open’ with learning and teaching resources. Keynote speaker Kieran McGlade (Queen’s University Belfast) kicked off proceedings with an Introduction to open educational resources (OERs) and open educational practice (OEP). Suzanne Hardy (MEDEV) rounded off the session in the afternoon with many practical tips and advice on tools to use that will aid the development of OERs. Further Reading Mitigating the effort of creating OERs 1. 2. 3.
Examining Open Education This past week, I had the chance to delve deeper into the idea of open education and open education resources (OER) thanks to both #ETMOOC and the #MediaLabCourse. Before this week, I hadn’t spent much time considering the differences between “open” and “free” and the power they can bring to people around the world when they are combined together. Free is valuable for the accessibility it provides but open, I discovered, means much more than just making something accessible or available to the public. It also means providing transparency and the blueprint for how and even why something was created. This unique insight into how something was made (e.g., a website, a software program), allows users to make the transition from consumers to creators much more easily. Suddenly, the plans behind a product are not only visible but they’re also “unlocked” and available for re-mixing, mashing, and updating so that they can meet the needs of individual contexts and previously unimagined goals.
education Welcome to the free OpenLearn course on open education. This course runs over seven weeks and is focused around the subject of openness in education. The course is an adapted extract from the Open University Masters-level course H817 Openness and innovation in elearning55 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip56)] (of which this is one of four blocks) and open, informal learners. This is the ‘stand alone’ version of the course, so you will be studying it independently of other students. The course operates an activity-based pedagogy, so within each week there will be approximately four activities: in these you will typically be expected to read some material (or view some other media), perform an activity and create a short blog post. The course is set out week by week as many learners prefer to structure their study this way and, particularly for an open course, it helps to coordinate discussion. The topics you will study in the coming weeks are:
Open Course Library releases 39 more high-enrollment courses Jane Park, April 30th, 2013 OCL How-to Guide / SBCTC / CC BY A year and a half ago, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) released the first 42 of Washington state’s 81 high-enrollment courses under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY). The Open Course Library project is funded by the Washington State Legislature and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. For further background on the project, read our 2010 feature about the project when it was just beginning. Update The SBCTC held a press call today bringing to light a new Cost Analysis report on savings for students where Open Course Library courses have been used in lieu of traditional course materials. Tags: cable green, CC BY, ocw, OER, Open Course Library, open courses, open courseware, open textbooks, SBCTC, washington state, washington state board for community and technical colleges