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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