K-12
Math instructor releases 2,600 videos under Creative Commons Attribution
Arizona Phoenix College math instructor James Sousa has been teaching math for 15 years at both the community college and K-12 levels. Over the years, he has developed more than 2,600 video tutorials on topics from arithmetic to calculus, and made these videos available on YouTube, originally under a CC BY-NC-SA license. His website and videos, entitled, Mathispower4u, feature both math lessons and examples, and many of the videos have been incorporated into online homework questions available at MyOpenMath.com.
Recently, James decided to change the license on his videos from CC BY-NC-SA to CC BY, or Creative Commons Attribution. He writes,
“Originally, the videos were licensed CC BY-NC-SA. However, the reason for creating these videos was to help students be more successful in mathematics. To increase student access and more easily share this resource with others, I decided to make the videos more open and change the license to CC BY. I hope the videos will provide a quality math tutorial resource to many.”
Mathispower4u videos may be accessed in several ways, including through James’ website, blog, YouTube account, and Phoenix College’s video database. Thanks to James for his great contribution to open education and the field of mathematics!
5 Comments »Engage 2012 Student Video Competition
If you work with K-12 students in the United States (or if you are one), then you’ll want to know about this video competition. Engage 2012 asks young people to create short videos about political issues impacting their communities. All entries will be uploaded to YouTube under CC BY, meaning lots of great fodder for future remixes.
Every four years, American voters decide who calls the White House home. And the road to the election is full of questions. How does the next presidential election affect you, your family, and your neighborhood?
Answers to this question appear in newspapers, on television, and on the radio. But we want to know what the story is in your community. There’s just one question: Can you tell us in two minutes?
The Engage in Democracy 2012 Student Journalism Challenge is a competition for K-12 students from across the United States and its territories. Our goal is to involve you in the political process.
To participate, shoot a video under two minutes in length using stories from around your community with a focus on one of these six big election topics:
- Voter Turnout
- Jobs and the Economy
- Education Reform
- Health Care
- Energy and the Environment
- Immigration
The contest is open through November 5.
No Comments »OER K-12 Bill Passes in U.S. Washington State
There was exciting open policy news from U.S. Washington State (WA) last evening.
HB 2337 “Regarding open educational resources in K-12 education” passed the Senate (47 to 1) and is on its way back to the House for final concurrence. It already passed the House 88 to 7 before moving to the Senate.
The bill directs the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to support the 295 WA K-12 school districts in learning about and adopting existing open educational resources (OER) aligned with WA and common core curricular standards (e.g., CK-12 textbooks & Curriki). The bill also directs OSPI to “provide professional development programs that offer support, guidance, and instruction regarding the creation, use, and continuous improvement of open courseware.”
The opening section of the bill reads:
- “The legislature finds the state’s recent adoption of common core K-12 standards provides an opportunity to develop high-quality, openly licensed K-12 courseware that is aligned with these standards. By developing this library of openly licensed courseware and making it available to school districts free of charge, the state and school districts will be able to provide students with curricula and texts while substantially reducing the expenses that districts would otherwise incur in purchasing these materials. In addition, this library of openly licensed courseware will provide districts and students with a broader selection of materials, and materials that are more up-to-date.”
While focus of this bill is to help school districts identify existing high-quality, free, openly licensed, common core state standards aligned resources available for local adoption; any content built with public funds, must be licensed under “an attribution license.”
Representative Reuven Carlyle has been a leader working on open education (including the Open Course Library) in WA for years and has blogged about it: here, here, here and here.
Representative Carlyle introducing HB2337 in the House:
Creative Commons’ Director of Global Learning, Cable Green, testifying about the impact of the bill on elementary education in the Senate:
WA is poised to follow the good work of Utah, Brazil, and so many others who have gone before.
This legislature has declared that the status quo — $130M / year for expensive, paper-only textbooks that are, on average, 7-11 years out of date — is unacceptable. WA policy makers instead decided their 1 million+ elementary students deserve better and they have acted.
Congratulations Washington State!
4 Comments »Video from CC Salon NYC: Opening Education
For those of you who missed CC Salon NYC: Opening Education, we uploaded live recordings of the event to the CC blip.tv channel a while back. The video recording is split up into three parts in-line with the three sessions to make it easier for you to pick and choose what to watch:
- Flat World Knowledge (as mentioned earlier today),
- Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU),
- and a dynamic panel of K-12 technologists and educators (my personal favorite from the event).
All videos are available via CC BY, of course. I’d also like to point out that the Hewlett OER Grantees meeting is going on right now, which you can follow with the hashtag #oerhf.
No Comments »Teaching Open Source Software
If you’re like me, then you don’t know much about software; if you’re not like me, then you know about software but not much about open source software (OSS). Regardless of which camp you fall into, there’s good news—you can learn about open source software (and help others learn about it) through open educational resources on OSS online. Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How to be Productively Lost, the Open Source Way is teachingopensource.org‘s new textbook to help professors, or anyone for that matter, teach or learn about open source software. “It’s a book that works like an open source software project. In other words: patches welcome.”
For those needing something quick and simple to hand out to their classes, educators can contribute to or adapt this textbook (it’s licensed under CC BY-SA so you can share, translate, remix as long as you share alike) or search for other OER online. One K-12 educator developed this resource under CC BY, A K-12 Educator’s Guide to Open Source Software.
Via CC licenses, both resources enable a community of educators and learners to contribute to, edit, and improve them, especially Practical Open Source Software Exploration which invites people to edit the wiki directly. But fostering a community around open resources to keep them up-to-date and relevant isn’t something that just magically happens, which is why Red Hat, a successful business built around OSS, developed this meta-resource: The Open Source Way: Creating and nurturing communities of contributors. The book is available in wiki-form also under CC BY-SA, and “it contains knowledge distilled from years of Red Hat experience, which itself comes from the many years of experience of individual upstream contributors who have worked for Red Hat.” Basically, it’s a guide “for helping people to understand how to and how not to engage with community over projects such as software, content, marketing, art, infrastructure, standards, and so forth.” Of course none of this is set in stone (literally), since what works for some might not for others, but it’s worth taking a look and adapting to your own needs.
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