Showing posts with label oer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oer. Show all posts

06 April 2012

Polish Government Funding 'Full Set Of Educational Materials' Available Under CC-BY

One of the fields that is ripe for disruption by open digital technologies and business models based on abundance is education. That's already starting to happening with growing successes in the areas of open access and free textbooks. Now here's a major win for open educational resources in Poland (via Slashdot): 

On Techdirt.

30 November 2009

Harnessing Openness in Higher Education

Surprisingly, perhaps, education was one of the late-comers to the openness party (couldn't be all those fiercely protective academic egos, could it?) Happily, ground is rapidly being made up in areas like open access, open courseware and open educational resources (OER), with a steady stream of important studies looking at how openness can be applied to make education better.

I've not come across the Committee for Economic Development before, but I like their thinking in this new report "Harnessing Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education". Here's a sample from the summary:

We do not expect OER to simply replace more closed, proprietary educational materials which themselves are increasingly becoming digital. And there are many issues that must be addressed if OER is to live up to its potential. OER has been supply driven, with creators posting whatever interests them regardless of how or even whether it is used; to be successful OER must meet the needs of users. We need to know how OER is actually being used, how effective it is, particularly in comparison with existing materials, and what impact it has on learners. We need to rethink our copyright rules to allow increased non-commercial educational uses of copyrighted materials beyond the traditional classroom in order to facilitate the further development of OER. Just as new approaches to sustainability are being developed to support open-source software and open-access scientific journals, we will need to see if there are ways to sustain the development and distribution of free high-quality, academically rigorous, and pedagogically sound OER that take full advantage of its digital nature.

It also shows a good appreciation of one of the key obstacles to openness in education - and elsewhere:

The intellectual property arguments that have been invoked to oppose public-access mandates for government-funded research and the digitization and partial display of the world’s books suggest to us the need to recalibrate our intellectual property rules for the digital age. Intellectual property rules should serve not only those who first create a work (and subsequent rights holders) but should also recognize the needs of users who often are follow-on creators. When the application of existing intellectual property rules appear to regularly have perverse effects — electronic books having text-to-speech capabilities turned off to the detriment of the visually impaired, or university presses, created to increase the accessibility of scholarly materials, invoking copyright protections to have their material removed from the globally accessible Web — it is time to step back and revisit not only the specific applications of the rules but the rules themselves. Given the complexity of these issues, universities should be forceful proponents for greater openness in legislative debates about IP, and should be educating their faculties about their intellectual property rights.

That's truly remarkable given the background of the Committee for Economic Development that is behind the report:

CED is a Trustee-directed organization. CED's Trustees are chairmen, presidents, and senior executives of major American corporations and university presidents. Trustees alone set CED's research agenda, develop policy recommendations, and speak out for their adoption. Unique among U.S. business organizations, CED offers senior executives a nonpolitical forum for exploring critical long-term issues and making an impact on U.S. policy decisions.

CED is proud of its reputation as a group of business and education leaders committed to improving the growth and productivity of the U.S. economy, a freer global trading system, and greater opportunity for all Americans. CED's Trustees understand that business, government, and individuals are jointly responsible for our mutual security and prosperity.

These are clearly not a bunch of sandal-wearing hippies, but a bunch of hard-headed business people who can see the economic case for more openness in education.

The rest of report offers useful potted histories of openness in education, and even broadens out to include transparency - an interesting indication of this rising meme. Overall, well worth reading for those interested in this area.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

16 July 2009

(Open) Learning from Open Source

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am intrigued by the way that ideas from free software are moving across to different disciplines. Of course, applying them is no simple matter: there may not be an obvious one-to-one mapping of the act of coding to activities in the new domain, or there may be significant cultural differences that place obstacles in the way of sharing.

Here's a fascinating post that explores some of the issues around the application of open source ideas to open educational resources (OER):


For all my fascination with all things open-source, I'm finding that the notion of open source software (OSS) is one that's used far too broadly, to cover more categories than it can rightfully manage. Specifically, the use of this term to describe collaborative open education resource (OER) projects seems problematic. The notion of OSS points to a series of characteristics and truths that do not apply, for better or worse, to the features of collaborative learning environments developed for opening up education.

While in general, open educational resources are developed to adhere to the letter of the OSS movement, what they miss is what we might call the spirit of OSS, which for my money encompasses the following:

* A reliance on people's willingness to donate labor--for love, and not for money.

* An embrace of the "failure for free" model identified by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody.

* A loose collaboration across fields, disciplines, and interest levels.

Open educational resources are not, in general, developed by volunteers; they are more often the product of extensive funding mechanisms that include paying participants for their labor.

Unusually, the post does not simply lament this problem, but goes on to explore a possible solution:

an alternate term for OERs designed in keeping with the open source ideals: community source software (CSS)

Worth reading in its entirety, particularly for the light it sheds on things we take for granted in open source.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

05 November 2008

Open Educational Resources

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation hase probably done more than anyone else to further open education, and it's at it again, this time with a centralised site for Open Educational Resources (OER):

To ensure that all the valuable knowledge created about OER and the OER cause is readily accessible to a broad audience, the Hewlett Foundation partnered with IssueLab to create a comprehensive OER document repository. This web site is the result of that partnership.

The vision for this web site is, in essence, a knowledge management center where the materials and documentation that we all use in our work to further the cause of OER are easy to share and access. This web site is not the place to share OER resources such as syllabi or course modules. A great place to share those types of materials is the OER Commons.

This repository is a joint project of the OER community and is managed by IssueLab, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), and the Education Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

21 March 2007

Learning about Open Educational Resources

Major European studies on open source are two a penny these days (and that's good), but some of the other opens have yet to achieve this level of recognition. So the appearance of major EU report on Open Educational Resources from the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project is particularly welcome.

At present a world-wide movement is developing which promotes unencumbered open access to digital resources such as content and software-based tools to be used as a means of promoting education and lifelong learning. This movement forms part of a broader wave of initiatives that actively promote the “Commons” such as natural resources, public spaces, cultural heritage and access to knowledge that are understood to be part of, and to be preserved for, the common good of society. (cf. Tomales Bay Institute, 2006)

With reference to the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation justifies their investment in OER as follows: “At the heart of the movement toward Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and re-use knowledge. OER are the parts of that knowledge that comprise the fundamental components of education – content and tools for teaching, learning and research.”

Since the beginning of 2006, the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project has explored how Open Educational Resources (OER) can make a difference in teaching and learning. Our initial findings show that OER do play an important role in teaching and learning, but that it is crucial to also promote innovation and change in educational practices. The resources we are talking about are seen only as a means to an end, and are utilised to help people acquire the competences, knowledge and skills needed to participate successfully within the political, economic, social and cultural realms of society.

Despite its title, it covers a very wide area, including open courseware, open access and even open source. It's probably the best single introduction to open educational resources around today - and it's free, as it should be. (Via Open Access News.)