Open Education

External Review Toolkit for ODL and eLearning Courses. Finding the open in the in-between:changing culture and space in high… FutureLearn ‘delighted’ at response to first Moocs. Source: Corbis Figures showing participation rates for the first massive open online courses offered by FutureLearn have revealed that more than one in 10 students signing up are fully taking part in the courses offered by the UK’s first Mooc platform. According to statistics for 20 of the platform’s first 29 courses, an average of 10,694 learners registered for each Mooc. Allowing for gaps in the data (full participation statistics were not available for all courses – see table, below), 13 per cent of registered students were deemed to have “fully participated” in their Mooc, meaning they had completed all the online assessments and taken part in a majority of the course activities.

Around one in three students were defined as “social learners”, a description indicating that they had actively participated in online forums and discussion relating to their course. The courses were released in two waves. Simon Nelson, FutureLearn chief executive, said he was “delighted” by the figures. Online Course Categories. Reframing Open in the context of the Digital University – Part 2 | 3E Education. In the first of the two blog posts that accompany our presentation at #oer16, Sheila MacNeill introduced our work exploring the idea of the Digital University that we have been undertaking with our colleague Bill Johnston.

The catalyst for our work was the Conceptual Matrix for the Digital University that Sheila and Bill produced, and which we then applied in scoping and carrying out a strategic ‘digital futures’ consultation in my previous institution (Smyth, MacNeill and Johnston, 2015). In Part 1 of our posting, Sheila discussed the need to take a broader look at what ‘open’ might mean and the limitations that are inherent in conflating ‘open’ with ‘online’. Sheila also introduced the idea of ‘third space’ in the context of bridging formal and informal learning and institutional cultures. Our initial and ‘imperfect’ thinking on the ‘digitally distributed curriculum’ (DFWG, 2014) We look towards what we can learn from them, in what is still a gloriously messy area. Like this: Reframing Open in the context of the digital university – part 1 #oer16.

In preparation for our #OER16 presentation, this is the first of two blog posts where Keith Smyth and will build on our abstract and give a bit more detail and context around our current thinking. There’s quite a bit to pack into a 15 minute conference presentation so we hope that these posts will allow us to elaborate a bit more, ask some questions and hopefully get some feedback which we can take into the session itself. We’ll also follow up after the session itself. For the past 3 years now, Keith, Bill Johnston and myself have been investigating and trying to unpack the notion of a digital university, and develop a way to move from what can be a very tech-centric, view of “the digital” to one which is more balanced and includes people, pedagogy, and wider societal factors.

If, as we are starting to do, we take open as the lens to examine our conceptual matrix, then a number of questions arise. As our abstract states Like this: Like Loading... Wenner-Gren International Series Volume 88 | PORTLAND PRESS. MIT%20Online%20Education%20Policy%20Initiative%20April%202016 0. Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet. On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication.

It was a small act of information age defiance, and perhaps also a bit of a throwback, somewhat analogous to Stephen King’s 2000 self-publishing an e-book or Radiohead’s 2007 release of a download-only record without a label. To commemorate it, she tweeted the website’s confirmation under the hashtag #ASAPbio, a newly coined rallying cry of a cadre of biologists who say they want to speed science by making a key change in the way it is published. "WOW! Europe embraces MOOCs" Presentations online - Higher education Online: MOOCs the European way (home) IRRODL Announcement 16.6. Researching Open Educational Resources and Open Pedagogical Practices… OER16 Open Culture Conference – Open as in Open | Open World.

In keeping with the ethos of open education, the OER conferences have always made an effort to be as diverse, inclusive and, well, open as possible and OER16 Open Culture is no exception. The draft conference programme has recently been announced and we’re delighted to have accepted 101 papers and panels from 29 different countries. OER16 presenters will come from 29 countries around the world Bearing the recent #allmalepanels meme in mind, we’re also aware of issues relating to gender balance and diversity and we’re very pleased to have almost 50/50 representation. Of over a hundred lead authors who recorded their gender along with their submission, 49% are female and 51 % male, and our keynotes are similarly balanced. Although the University of Edinburgh is clearly a popular destination for delegates, not all of our presenters and participants are able to travel to Scotland for a wide range of reasons, so we are happy to facilitate remote presentation.

Like this: Like Loading... 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. For more about the potential of OER, check out "5-Minute Film Festival: Why Open Education Matters," by Edutopia's VideoAmy.

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. Open Data as Open Educational Resources. The Consensus Around “Open” Yesterday EdSurge published an opinion piece by Stephen Laster, the Chief Digital Officer at McGraw-Hill Education, titled The Future of Education Isn’t Free.

It’s Open. The article makes a strong argument for the importance of interoperability among learning platforms, tools, and content. I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly endorse this message – interoperability of platforms, tools, and resources is absolutely critical to education becoming significantly more effective – and significantly less annoying – in the future. However. While I wholeheartedly support, endorse, approve, and praise arguments extolling the virtues of interoperability, I unequivocally renounce, oppose, and reject arguments that attempt to weaken the meaning of “open.” Several paragraphs into the article we read, “There’s some debate about just what we mean by ‘open’ in the context of education.” The Smallest Possible Review of “Open” in Education Open DataThe Open Data Handbook defines open data as: 1.

Find and sell teaching resources. Web 2.0 Resources. Home. Home. Guide... There are countless websites offering images, video and audio files for use in education, but it's not always easy to know which sites are most useful or appropriate.

This advice document discusses general tools and strategies for finding digital resources and looks at many of the sites you can use as reliable sources. This is one of two advice documents about finding digital media resources online. This first document looks at tools and strategies for finding digital resources, and highlights some of the general sources you can use to find images, video and audio to use in teaching, learning and research.

The other document provides advice and pointers on finding subject-specific types of still images, moving images and sound files. You may also be interested in the online Moodle tutorials we have developed, which are currently hosted by RSC Wales: The Internet has grown to become an incredible resource and is the first port of call for many people's information searches. Web directories. Finding OERs. Search engines A number of search engines exist to search Open Educational Resources. These include: DiscoverEd - "Discover the Universe of Open Educational Resources"Jorum - "free learning and teaching resources, created and contributed by teaching staff from UK Further and Higher Education Institutions"OCWFinder - "search, recommend, collaborate, remix"OER Commons - "Find Free-to-Use Teaching and Learning Content from around the World.

Organize K-12 Lessons, College Courses, and more. "Temoa - "a knowledge hub that eases a public and multilingual catalog of Open Educational Resources (OER) which aims to support the education community to find those resources and materials that meet their needs for teaching and learning through a specialized and collaborative search system and social tools. " Dandelion Image CC BY-NC-SA monteregina. Khan Academy. Lessons. Books | TACCLE 2. NYPL Digital Collections. Innovating pedagogy 2015. 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. Open Educational Resources (OER) OER. Open education resources. Open Data Portals | Digital Agenda for Europe. Creative Commons Summit: next steps in copyright reform. The Creative Commons Summit, a bi-annual meeting of members of the CC network and friends of the Commons, took place in mid-October in Seoul, South Korea.

One of the event’s tracks was devoted to copyright reform advocacy. The track was organised by member organisations of Communia, including Creative Commons. In 2013, during the previous CC Summit, Creative Commons adopted a position on copyright reform. CC re-emphasized that even though the licenses are an essential mechanism to share creativity within the existing bounds of the law, it is now more important than ever to engage in a review and modernisation of copyright law itself. This commitment was confirmed during this year event. Julia Reda: CC should be more than a copyright fig leaf Communia was especially honored to have MEP Julia Reda, the author of the European copyright evaluation report, give a keynote at the Summit.

Copyright advocacy: EFF’s tools and tips Where should we start? Next steps: copyright-free education. What is open data? CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Do you remember life before Citymapper? Thanks to Transport for London opening its data, a new wave of innovative transport apps were made possible. This is just one example of how open data has contributed to our everyday lives financially, socially, culturally and more. Open data impacts everybody. Through it we can improve how we access healthcare services, discover cures for diseases more efficiently, understand our governments better and, of course, travel to places more easily. What is the definition? Open data is data that anyone can access, use or share. Some of us worry about personal health records being “made open”. The benefits of open data Open data has proven benefits for our economies and citizens. The Open Data Institute has identified open data-driven UK companies with a combined annual turnover of over £92bn, employing over 500,000 people.