Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials

Hal Plotkin (DOE) has released Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials.

The guide explains how the flexibility and diversity of Open Educational Resources (OER) can improve teaching and learning in higher education, all while retaining quality and enabling resource sharing and collaboration.

Free to Learn features case studies and highlights several interviews with leaders of the OER community. The document suggests that community colleges are uniquely positioned to both take advantage of OER opportunities and to become pioneers in teaching through the creative and cost-effective use of OER.

“The tremendous promise of Open Educational Resources for advancing the mission of higher education is clear,” said Hal Plotkin, author of Free to Learn. “Higher education governance officials need only summon the will and enact governing board policies that institutionalize support for OER to move these activities from the periphery of higher education to its core, where the results would be truly transformative. We hope that this guide provides a starting point that builds understanding of OER and its incredible potential for transforming teaching and learning.”

Plotkin currently serves as Senior Policy Advisor to Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter at the U.S. Department of Education, and is a longtime supporter of community colleges and Creative Commons. He is the former president of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District Governing Board of Trustees and penned one of the first articles about Creative Commons for SF Gate in 2002.  (Creative Commons post)

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Note: Washington Community and Technical Colleges are helping to lead this conversation – see pages 17 & 21.

Please share this new guidebook with all interested parties.

Why Share Open Educational Resources?

Why would anyone want to share their course, their best ideas, their intellectual property?

Why would someone openly license their digital work with a creative commons license? According to Hilton and Wiley (2010), there are four common reasons people might be motivated to share their educational resources:

Receive Increased Exposure: sharing your work openly online allows access to many more people 

― Lawrence Lessig published his book Free Culture in 2004. Although the book has sold tens of thousands copies, the free digital version has been downloaded several hundred thousand times. Perhaps more importantly, it has been translated into seven different languages, audio versions are freely available, and it has been put into sixteen different file formats. All of these translations and format changes are freely available for others to download.‖ (p. 6).

Give New Life to Out-of-Print Works: openly licensed works never go out of print 

― A significant problem in the publishing world relates to orphan books (Boyle, 2008). These are books that are out-of-print, and the copyright owner of the books cannot easily be identified. As time passes the out-of-print book becomes increasingly unavailable, as publishers merge and authors change locations, it can become impossible to locate‖ (p. 7).

Improve the Quality of Educational Resources: when resources are “open” and can be reused, redistributed, revised and remixed … they can get better over time 

― When an educational resource is published openly it may bring about the mechanisms of peer review (Wiley, 2009). If people know their educational resource will be viewed by others they might desire to make it better than they ordinarily would. In addition, as others use the resource they may improve it and return the revised version to the creator, who then benefits from the improvement‖ (p. 8).

― Openness has a tendency to lead to better material used in courses not only because faculty can build on other open resources, but simply because teachers can more easily see what other teachers are doing. Just as observing others teach has been shown to improve teaching (Elmore, 1997), observing the educational resources that others use in the classroom may also improves teaching. Thus OERs benefit both the teachers‖ (p. 8).

Do Some Good: sharing educational resources helps people around the world access a higher education 

To get a sense of what’s possible when we share open educational resources, read the Cape Town Declaration.

― We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.‖

Open High School of Utah Releases Open Educational Curriculum Under CC BY

• Creative Commons Post
  
• Open High School of Utah's OpenCourseWare portal. 

From the announcement:

Technology rules at Open High where their approach to learning embraces the idea that teaching shouldn’t be as static as the textbooks on which it’s based. Shattering traditional methods, the Open High School of Utah curriculum is built from open educational resources. These resources are the foundation for their content and are aligned with Utah state standards to ensure the highest quality educational experience. The teachers enhance with screencasts, interactive components, and engaging activities to create high quality curricula for their students.

Start-Up Aspires to Make the World 'One Big Study Group'

Chronicle Article


Thousands of students are enrolling in gigantic open online courses.

Would students go for vast open online study groups, too?

OpenStudy, a start-up company spun off by Georgia Tech and Emory University, is betting the answer to that question is yes. Its Web site is the latest effort to create a social platform for independent learners who want to help each other study the huge trove of educational materials published free online by universities like MIT.

One Teen’s Vision of an Open Content Future

TEDx Post

High school student, Miller Singleton, of Georgia, was assigned the topic of Open Content Computing as part of the 2010 NetGenEd project, and produced this video of her vision for an Open Content Education Program, in which learners could use materials from the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative to obtain a college degree.

Said Miller, in her blog post about the project, ”It is my hope that with my video, people will learn that education is not limited to the classroom. If someone is unable to go to college, there is a way for he or she to get a college degree. Open content technology opens many doors, and with the economy as it is today, I feel confidant that it will be very helpful to many people."

Video

Webinar: 9/14/10: OER Content Playlists as Alternatives to Traditional Textbook Materials

You are invited to an Open Access Textbook Webinar

September 14, 2010, 2:00 PM (Eastern)

sponsored by The Open Access Textbook FIPSE grant project

Join us for this one-hour session on:

"OER Content Playlists as Alternatives to Traditional Textbook Materials"

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

2:00 - 3:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time 

Presenters: James Glapa-Grossklag  and John Makevich, College of the Canyons 

Presenters will share details of their two-year FIPSE grant project, related to reducing the high cost of academic materials for students. Their project goals include:

•           increasing access to open educational resources (OER) within their content repository and other repositories

•           creating new OER content to be housed within their repository, and

•           defining a model for academic content "playlists".  These playlists are a way of taking OER objects and assembling them in a sequential order with transition materials in order to emulate the flow of content in a traditional textbook.  Playlists can not only reduce the cost of access to learning materials, but can provide a way to actively compile otherwise individual objects into a cohesive and interactive academic outline.

Presenters will:

•           Discuss their progress thus far in populating their repository and some of the victories and challenges that have arisen. 

•           Preview the early steps in content playlist development and indicate what work remains to be done in that area. 

•           Examine some of the other ways the materials can be disseminated to students, such as campus printing solutions.

Join us for this session by following this link:  http://vclass.distancelearn.org:80/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1255635328526

No pre-registration is needed to participate in the webinar.

Learn more about the FIPSE Open Access Textbook Project at: http://openaccesstextbooks.org