OER

Building Open Bridges

07 Mai 2013
OER, OER, OER use and reuse, OER use and reuse, computer-based educational tools
Andmebaas

Building open bridges: collaborative remixing and reuse of open educational resources across organisations

08 Mai 2013

“Building open bridges: collaborative remixing and reuse of open educational resources across organisations” is a paper published in March 2013 by the University of Nottingham (UK) exploring new creative collaboration practices related to OER.

Authors Tim Coughlan, Rebecca Pitt and Patrick McAndrew explore in this paper practices that, developed as a set of course materials, were released as OER from the UK, remixed for a US context by a cross-organisational, cross- cultural team, and then reused in a broad range of educational settings. The approaches taken during these remixing and reuse activities as novel forms of creative collaboration are also analysed.

 

Researchers identify how openness has provoked novel inter- organisational collaboration and forms of ownership. They also define forms of open practice that need support and present issues that should be considered in devising and supporting open projects in education and beyond.

 

open educational resources, OER use and reuse, OER use and reuse, OER, OER
Andmebaas

Perspectives on Open and Distance Learning: Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice

08 Mai 2013

“Perspectives on Open and Distance Learning: Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice” is one in a series of publications by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) examining Open Educational Resources (OER).

The book, initiated by the UNESCO/COL Chair in OER, describes the movement in detail, providing readers with insight into OER’s significant benefits, its theory and practice, and its achievements and challenges.

 

The 16 chapters of the volume, published in May 2013, have been written by some of the leading international experts on the subject and are organised into four parts by theme:

 

  • OER in Academia: describes how OER are widening the international community of scholars, following MIT’s lead in sharing its resources and looking to the model set by the OpenCourseWare Consortium
  • OER in Practice: presents case studies and descriptions of OER initiatives underway on three continents
  • Diffusion of OER: discusses various approaches to releasing and “opening” content, from building communities of users that support lifelong learning to harnessing new mobile technologies that enhance OER access on the Internet
  • Producing, Sharing and Using OER: examines the pedagogical, organisational, personal and technical issues that producing organisations and institutions need to address in designing, sharing and using OER
OER, OER, change in higher education, open & distance learning
Andmebaas

2012 Paris OER Declaration

30 April 2013

The 2012 Paris OER Declaration was formally adopted at the 2012 World Open Educational Resources  Congress held at the UNESCO Headquarters in June 2012.

The Declaration marks a historic moment in the growing movement for Open Educational Resources (OER) and calls on governments worldwide to openly license publicly funded educational materials for public use.

 

The Declaration recommends UNESCO member States to:

  1. Foster awareness and use of OER.
  2. Facilitate enabling environments for use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).
  3. Reinforce the development of strategies and policies on OER.
  4. Promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks.
  5. Support capacity building for the sustainable development of quality learning materials.
  6. Foster strategic alliances for OER.
  7. Encourage the development and adaptation of OER in a variety of languages and cultural contexts.
  8. Encourage research on OER.
  9. Facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing of OER.
  10. Encourage the open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds.

UNESCO proposed with all relevant stakeholders to design and implement a series of global activities based on all the 10 points of the Declaration. This project aims to assist Member States in developing national-level OER policies and implementing the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (ICT CFT) by harnessing Open Educational Resources (OER).

 

The Inception Meeting of the "Implementing the Paris OER Declaration" project took place on 26 and 27 March, 2013 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

OER, OER, educational materials, e-resources, Open Source, open course
Uudised

Call for interest - an OER for training teacher trainers

22 April 2013

The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) invites expressions of interest for producing courseware in the form of an open educational resource for training teacher trainers in high quality open, distance and online learning. The target group for this call is an institution or consortium of actors/ institutions and the initial focus of the project is Africa.

Open, distance and online learning is rapidly expanding in universities and colleges in Africa and Asia, but faculty training has not caught up with the speed of development. According to the African Union Commission, the number of new teachers required in Africa by the year 2015 is estimated to be 3.6 million.

 

Online training using OERs will facilitate mass training of teacher trainers, which again will facilitate trained teachers in filling the huge gap in demand for educators in Africa. By using OERs, courseware can be adapted to different cultures and languages.

 

The OER/ courseware to receive an ICDE grant should focus on the needs of teacher trainers to deliver high quality faculty training in open and distance/ online learning. The first regional area of priority should be Africa. A regional focus on Asia will be considered when the project has delivered. 

 

The expressions of interest must be submitted to the ICDE Secretariat, icde@icde.org by Friday 31 May 2013. ICDE will invite a smaller selection of applicants to deliver a bid in the form of a project proposal. One successful bidder will be invited to enter into a contract with ICDE.  The value of the grant is USD 8,500.

OER, OER, social development, good teaching practices
Andmebaas

The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice

26 April 2013

Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University (UK), explores how new technologies are affecting the scholarly practice.

While industries such as music, newspapers, film and publishing have seen radical changes in their business models and practices as a direct result of new technologies, higher education has so far resisted the wholesale changes seen elsewhere. However, a gradual and fundamental shift in the practice of academics is taking place.

 

Every aspect of scholarly practice is seeing changes effected by the adoption and possibilities of new technologies. “The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice” explores these changes, their implications for higher education, the possibilities for new forms of scholarly practice and what lessons can be drawn from other sectors.

OER, OER, Open educational practices, innovation, change in higher education
Andmebaas

If we open it will they come? Towards a new OER Logic Model

25 April 2013

The paper “If we open it will they come? Towards a new OER Logic Model” presents the result of a multilingual empirical survey on the ‘micro level factors’ of using, creating sharing and reusing open educational resources (OER).

Authored by Dr Ulf-Daniel Ehler, Professor for Educational Management and Lifelong Learning at Baden-Wurttemberg Cooperative State University, the paper emerges from the assumption that current models of OER integration are often lacking factors to support the creation of a sustainable open educational practice culture in organisations.

 

Micro level factors for integration of OER into teaching and learning on basis of the results of an empirical survey are presented and interpreted. They are used to enhance the OER logic model(s) into an “enhanced OER logic model” which, in addition to create equalized access, is capable of creating a culture of open educational practices as well.

OER, OER, innovation, online resources
Andmebaas

Analyzing hidden semantics in social bookmarking of open educational resources

23 April 2013

Web 2.0 services such as social bookmarking allow users to manage and share the links they find interesting, adding their own tags for describing them. This is especially interesting in the field of open educational resources.

“Analyzing hidden semantics in social bookmarking of open educational resources” discusses the possibilities of using the crowd-sourcing phenomenon of social bookmarking for extracting semantics from the tags added by delicious users which describe links related to open educational resources (OER).

 

Author Julià Minguillón suggests the use of a simple statistical analysis tool to discover which tags create clusters that can be semantically interpreted. The obtained results are compared with a collection of resources related to OER in order to better understand the real needs of people searching for these.

e-resources, Metadata, tag, OER, OER
Artiklid

Global Open Education: A Roadmap for Internationalization

16 April 2013

The main goal of this paper is to stimulate the discussion on future issues on Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER) in a mid- and long-term perspective.

The main issue discussed is how OER are utilized on an international level. Internationalization and global collaboration are crucial to Open Education:

 

  • How can OER be utilized across borders?
  • How can OER contribute towards better education for less developed countries?
  • How can Open Education contribute towards better collaboration in Europe and globally?

 

These are just some questions to be explored and solved in the next years. As a starting point, I would recommend two key visions:

 

1. Creating a European Open Education community towards collaboration, mutual support and participation.

2. Creating global outreach of European Open Education towards European leadership in both, the educational market and development cooperation.

 

This paper identifies key issues and potential solutions for international aspects regarding open education. Using a roadmapping methodology, I propose steps and recommendations for advancing Open Education.

 

open education, OER, OER, open educational resources
Uudised

Call for contributions to the EIF2013 now open

27 Märts 2013

The EFQUEL Innovation Forum is the leading conference for practitioners in international quality and innovation in e-learning, training and development. The 8th EIF takes place at the Open University Catalunya in Barcelona.

EFQUEL welcomes different types of contributions to the EIF2013. Read more about the topic to be addressed and find submission information via this page on the EIF2013 website.

 

The financial crisis and a regime of austerity pose a great challenge to innovation in education, training and learning in Europe, both in the public and the private sector. The question where and how e-learning can add value to providing a high quality education is put into the center every more. After a decade of quality assurance and development in e-learning, the field today has broadened significantly. Two facts have become apparent: on the one hand, quality has become a synonym for continuous improvement, innovation and organizational development and has moved beyond assuring conformity and standardization. On the other hand it is evident that quality development has become mainstream practice in every educational institution and is important for all learning provision. Both developments are a sign that the quality debate in e-learning has moved from early stages of development and try-out to a more professionalized practice.

 

With a new wave of e-learning emerging through new and fascinating developments like Open educational resources, MOOCs and social media in learning and a decade of intense development of quality criteria, methods and management approaches it is time to extract the scientific essence: Where do we stand today in quality development in e-learning? What has proved working well? What is the orientation for the future? Which new and emerging fields and technologies are posing new challenges to quality development?  While the past years have seen a lot of adoption of traditional quality approaches to new fields, as well as the developments of new quality approaches today we invite the contributions to the following themes:

 

Quality in e-learning: Criteria, processes, methodologies
  • Quality for new emerging technologies and pedagogies (e.g.MOOCs)
  • Quality, E-Assessment and testing with e-learning
quality, change in higher education, MOOCs, Social Media, OER, OER