Open Educational Resources: A Remix

Jim Julius

SDSU Course Design Institute

May 27, 2009

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Objectives

What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)? Why are OERs considered important by so many? Where can you find OERs?

NOT: Mechanics of incorporating OERs into your own courses.

NOT: Creating and sharing OERs.

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To remain human and liveable,

knowledge societies will have to be

societies of shared knowledge.

Koïchiro Matsuura,

Director-General of UNESCO

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Challenges…

Challenges facing societies– Globalization– Rise of knowledge-intensive societies Demand for increasingly skilled population

Challenges to education systems– Extend reach of education– Improve quality and flexibility Could technology offer the solution?

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New developments…

An important convergence– Increasing connectivity– Growing numbers of low-cost devices– Expanding body of open digital content

Together they facilitate the sharing of knowledge

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Open Educational Resources: a definition

Web-based materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research

(UNESCO, 2002)

Only open if they are released under an open licence Includes any tool, material or technique used to support

access to knowledge Contribute to building a culture of sharing

create

share

usefreely

re-useopenly

vibrantinteractivecommunityconnectedinnovativeup-to-dateefficienteffective

open education

today’s textbook pipeline

authoring

editing

quality control

publishing

distribution

open education ecosystem

authoring

editing

quality control

publishing

distribution

feedbackpeersuserslearning

Enabler: new IP

intellectual propertyand copyright

make content safe to share

common legal vocabulary

inspiration: open-source software (Linux)

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MERLOThttp://merlot.org Strategic goal: improve the

effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer-reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses

CSU is “sustaining partner”; many other state systems and prominent institutions are partners

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MIT OpenCourseWarehttp://ocw.mit.edu 1999: faculty response to challenge

of online education 2000: OCW initiated Goal: make accessible all primary

course material on the web 2002: launched 50-course pilot 2009: almost 1,900 courses

available

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Rice University Connexionshttp://cnx.org Individual response to limitations of

traditional textbooks The vision: “textbooks adapted to many

learning styles and translated into myriad languages… textbooks that are continually updated and corrected by a legion of contributors” (Rich Baraniuk)

500+ textbooks, 1 million unique users/mo., 45 million hits/mo., 190 countries

open education opportunities

open access

free on-line

low-cost in print

never out-of-print

high-quality

continuously updated

translated

democratic

More OERs to consider Video / audio / lecture

– http://learner.org– http://youtube.com/edu– http://bigthink.com– http://ted.com– http://itunesu.pbworks.com/

Other collections of learning objects/resources– http://curriki.org– http://oercommons.org

Search images, music, and more– http://search.creativecommons.org/

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