Last week, a bill enabling the California Community Colleges to integrate open educational resources (OER) into its core curriculum was signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger. AB 2261 authorizes the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges “to establish a pilot program to provide faculty and staff from community college districts around the state with…
The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is a global movement. Education is an issue that crosses borders and spans continents; open education—the creation and distribution of OER—empowers people in a global dialogue. However, the mere promotion of OER is not sufficient for the success of this international effort, as many issues and barriers to open education…
Although we’ve already had a weekend plus a Monday to digest COSL’s Open Ed ’08, the events from the conference and general good feeling inspired by speakers and individual conversations still drives us forward into the week and the beginning of next month. This year’s conference featured several notable speakers; the keynotes themselves were given…
There’s been a whole lot of press on open textbooks lately, in addition to my own posts on the Flexbook and the Student PIRGs’ recent report encouraging open source textbooks as the right model for digital textbooks (versus the limited e-books that commercial publishers currently offer). The difference in open source and commercial e-books is…
The JISC CETIS (JISC Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards) is a JISC funded service that has long been researching educational technology and covering the field’s latest developments under a CC BY-NC-SA license. One of their latest publications is a briefing paper on open educational resources (OER) titled, “Open Educational Resources — Opportunities and…
The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) has been hosting an OER Handbook on WikiEducator for a while now, inviting others to contribute and edit various elements of the book. Now they’ve finally published the first printable version of one of their mini-handbooks: OER Handbook for Educators 1.0. The actual handbook isn’t so mini—though…
The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) is dedicated to education. It is now available online, including two articles specifically devoted to open education: “A Flat Network for the Unflat World: Open Educational Resources in Developing Countries” (Steven Muegge, Monica Mora, Kamal Hassin, Andrew Pullin) and “Why Give Knowledge Away for Free?…
Today TED announced the 50 millionth view of a TED talk, marking its success since it first launched online two years ago in June of 2006. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design—and it features talks by various speakers from Bill Clinton to Bono. However, the most viewed talks are actually given by persons previously unknown.…
OpenEducation.net tracks the changing climate of education–more specifically, the movement towards the growing availability of Open Educational Resources on the web. In a recent post entitled, The Digital Commons — Left Unregulated, Are We Destined for Tragedy? , they explore the potential of the open digital commons, concluding that open access is the key to…
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a tremendous supporter of Creative Commons and our new educational division, ccLearn. The foundation’s newsletter just published a great interview with Catherine Casserly, their Program Officer for Open Educational Resources. Here are a couple excerpts: Aren’t copyright laws an obstacle to all of this? Traditionally, they have…