OER
eLearning Papers: Call for articles on Mobile Learning open until November 19th
While learning has always expanded beyond the walls of the classroom, the proliferation of devices and applications, which have greatly expanded when, where and how information can be accessed and stored, brings this issue to the fore. How have such devices had an impact in learning, and what role may they play in the future? This issue hopes to showcase practical examples and generate serious reflection on an emerging topic.
Today’s youth are growing up in a world very different from the world their teachers or parents knew when they were young. Where and how they learn is changing as mobile learning and social networking become part of their every day life. Ubiquitous access to social media, tools and knowledge resources is taken for granted, while passive teacher-directed work dominates life at school.
Open, social and participatory media have significant potential to transform learning and teaching. They offer numerous ways to communicate, collaborate and connect with peers. The range of free educational resources and tools is rapidly increasing. Cloud computing has enabled free or inexpensive access to applications that were once available only to those who were willing to pay premium license fees.
The gap between the potential and actual use of technology in education is a paradox. eLearning Papers seeks to facilitate the sharing of innovative and creative uses of technology to support learning among its readers. The upcoming 32nd issue focuses on mobile technology applications and their potential to enhance learning within the broad spectrum of education and training. Papers are welcome on any aspects related to the use of open, social and participatory media, cloud computing or mobile learning. Some suggested focus areas are listed below.
- How do mobile devices enhance learning and creativity?
- Mobile learning and creative classrooms
- OER for mobile learning
- Mobile learning management models and strategies
- Learning design for mobile learning
- Mobile learning platforms, devices and operating systems
- Authoring tools and technologies for mobile learning
- Content design and development for mobile learning
- Platform specific applications for learning
- Augmented reality in education
- Mixed reality and mobile devices supporting learning
- Mobile devices and schoolwork, in classrooms and beyond
- Mobile devices supporting performance and learning at work
- Low-tech mobile learning, e.g. the power of SMS
The article submission deadline is November 19th, 2012. The provisional date of publication is December, 2012. For further information and to submit your article, please contact: jimena.marquez@elearningpapers.eu
Guest editor: Prof. Dr. Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik FIT
Consultation on Opening Up Education Initiative Launched
The consultation on "Opening up Education - a proposal for a European Initiative to enhance education and skills development through new technologies", will explore the perceived need for EU action to promote the use of open educational resources (OER) in education.
From 13 August 2012 to 13 November 2012.
New technologies, in particular the internet, together with globalisation and the emergence of new education providers, are radically changing the way people learn and teach. Open access to education resources offers an unprecedented opportunity to enhance both excellence and equity in education. The EU aims to help both individual learners and education and training institutions in Member States to benefit from these opportunities and to increase their contribution to society.
In the last quarter of 2012, the Commission will present a Communication on Rethinking Skills aiming to increase the quantity, quality and relevance of skills supply for higher economic and social outcomes. This will, among other actions, announce a new EU Initiative on "Opening up Education": a proposal to exploit the potential contribution of ICTs and Open Educational Resources (OER) to education and skills development. This new EU initiative on "Opening up Education" will be the topic of a subsequent Communication in mid-2013.
View the consultation document 
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SpeakApps OER
SpeakApps Open Educational Resources (OER) consists of a set of online tools for practising oral production and interaction when learning foreign languages.
The SpeakApps openly licensed tools are directed at different types of activities and are suitable for all students, regardless of the level they have reached in a particular language.
The platform's OER repository allows teachers to find a growing amount of activities and experiences to be carried out in their classrooms. Moreover, and since the repository is build in a wiki environment, users are able to actively contribute to the project by modifying and adapting activities to their needs.
Net Texts: an app for the classroom
Net Texts is a free app which organises and delivers the wealth of Open Educational Resources available on the Internet.
Net Texts helps schools replace or supplement printed textbooks with customized multimedia courses delivered to students' iPads, Android tablets and laptops.
- Teachers use the app’s Content Management Website to select existing courses or to create new courses by mixing and matching items from the library with their own educational material.
- Students use the Next Texts iPad or Android or web app to download and view these courses, filled with videos, slideshows, e-books, PDFs, text, audiobooks and links.
The European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies leads the debate on ICT and Education
The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) has guest-edited the March 2013 special issue of the European Journal of Education on “ICT and Education: taking stock of progress and looking at the future.”
The issue of the European Journal of Education provides a critical review of evidence and opens the discussion on identifying and implementing major changes in education systems to meet the challenges of 21st century learning and society. In-house research by JRC provided 3 of the 7 articles of this special number.
Continuing on this research line, the learning and skills JRC-IPTS research team is working on European Commission's recent Communication on Rethinking Education, and the initiative “Opening-up Education”. Through the Open Educational Resources in Europe project (OEREU), JRC is to provide empirical evidence to policy makers in order to guide policies on the field of Open Education.
The OEREU project is managing a call for visionary papers, several workshops, and an online debate around a dedicated blog, to come up with visions and scenarios on how Open Education in 2030 in Europe might be for Lifelong Learning, School Education, and Higher Education. It is an opportunity for the Educational community to be involved in a European expert network that could have a direct impact on European Policies, especially now when MOOC's (Massive Open Online Courses) have become a hot topic for debate.
MOOCs "are only a part of what's happening” in Open Education
Patrick McAndrew, professor at the UK’s Open University and author of the article “Learning from Open Design: Running a Learning Design MOOC”, published in the latest issue of eLearning Papers, talks to us about his experience with Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Strongly involved in Open Education (OE) for the last 10 years, professor McAndrew believes MOOCs “are only a part of what's happening” in this field and there are still “lots of interesting developments to see”. He also points out that universities are currently feeling the pressure “to change”, but there is no doubt that they are also being “innovators”, trying to find new ways to “help learners and engage with people.”
Regarding the OLDS-MOOC (Open Learning Design Studio-MOOC) project which he introduces in his paper published in eLearning Papers 33, professor McAndrew says it has been a “rather stressful” but “rather exciting” nine-week rich experience, and invites the OE community to explore the material used to run this initiative, available online under a Creative Commons license.
Open Educational Resources: The value of reuse in higher education
The report “Open Educational Resources: The value of reuse in higher education” outlines the range of online resources that are being used and how, when, where and why they are being incorporated into learning.
In 2010, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) commissioned the University of Oxford to undertake a study to assess the impact of the use of OER in the UK higher education sector. The OER Impact Study ran from November 2010 to June 2011. This report is a summary of the findings of the research, written primarily for teaching staff and those supporting curriculum delivery processes who may not have considered the potential value of OER before.
The approach of the study was broad and highly qualitative; focusing on what motivates the reuse (or rejection) of digital resources found on the web, and exploring factors that staff and students value in educational content, such as provenance, quality, context and format.
The report begins by highlighting some key themes of the use and reuse of OER. It then outlines the study’s findings of current practice within the sector and suggests some of the attributes of educational content that are most valued by stakeholders in a range of contexts. It also describes approaches taken by staff when searching for educational content online and some of the ways in which they incorporate resources into the curriculum. The report concludes with the study’s recommendations around enhancing teaching practice, supporting learners, improving services and further research.
SPARC
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a library membership organisation that promotes expanded sharing of scholarship.
SPARC believes that faster and wider sharing of outputs of the research process increases the impact of research, fuels the advancement of knowledge, and increases the return on research investments. Hence, the coalition is promoting changes in both the infrastructure and culture needed to make Open Access the norm in scholarly communication.
Developed by the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC activities aim to advance acceptance and long-term sustainability of an open system for scholarly communication, with a primary focus on advancing open-access models for publishing and archiving the results of scholarly research.
The three key programme areas of the coalition are:
- Educating stakeholders about the problems facing scholarly communication and the opportunities for change;
- Advocating policy changes that advance the potential of technology to advance scholarly communication and that explicitly recognize that dissemination is an essential, inseparable component of the research process;
- Incubating real-world demonstrations of business and publishing models that advance changes benefiting scholarship and academe.
Membership in SPARC currently numbers nearly 800 institutions in North America, Europe, Japan, China, and Australia.
MOOCs and Beyond - eLearning Papers 33 released
Issue number 33 of eLearning Papers focuses on the challenges and future of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), a trend in education that has skyrocketed since 2008.
Guest edited by Dr Yishay Mor, Senior Lecturer at the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology (UK), and Tapio Koskinen, Director of the eLearning Papers Editorial Board, MOOCs and Beyond seeks to both generate debate and present a variety of perspectives about this new popular learning model.
The emergence of MOOCs poses a set of challenges to the educational community. This new special issue of eLearning Papers aims to shed light on the way these online courses affect both education institutions and learners, and tries to find answers to some of the questions confronted by teachers and researchers.
Among other topics, eLearning Papers 33 explores whether MOOCs may be a viable solution for education in developing countries and analyses the role of these emerging courses in the education system, especially in higher education. Furthermore, valuable examples from the field are presented, such as the quad-blogging concept and a game-based MOOC developed to promote entrepreneurship education.
This issue includes 4 In-Depth articles and 6 From the Field ones:
In-depth articles
- The Impact and Reach of MOOCs: A Developing Countries’ Perspective by Tharindu Liyanagunawardena, Shirley Williams and Andrew Adams
- MOOCs and disruptive innovation: Implications for higher education by Li Yuan and Stephen Powell
- The Next Game Changer: The Historical Antecedents of the MOOC Movement in Education by David T. Boven
- MOOC Design Principles. A Pedagogical Approach from the Learner’s Perspective by Lourdes Guàrdia, Marcelo Maina and Albert Sangrà
From the field articles
- MOOCs are More Social than You Believe by Jan Blom, Himanshu Verma, Nan Li, Afroditi Skevi and Pierre Dillenbourg
- Realising the Potential of Peer-to-Peer Learning: Taming a MOOC with Social Media by Emily Purser, Angela Towndrow and Ary Aranguiz
- Learning from Open Design: Running a Learning Design MOOC by Patrick McAndrew
- Quad-blogging: Promoting Peer-to- Peer Learning in a MOOC by Angela Towndrow, Ary Aranguiz, Emily Purser and Madhura Pradhan
- Game Based Learning MOOC. Promoting Entrepreneurship Education by Margarida Romero
- The AlphaMOOC: Building a Massive Open Online Course One Graduate Student at a Time by Carmen McCallum, Stephen Thomas and Julie C. Libarkin