Archive for the ‘Open education’ Category
MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education
This report sets out to help decision makers in higher education institutions gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and trends towards greater openness in higher education and to think about the implications for their institutions. The phenomena of MOOCs are described, placing them in the wider context of open education, online learning and the changes that are currently taking place in higher education at a time of globalisation of education and constrained budgets. The report is written from a UK higher education perspective, but is largely informed by the developments in MOOCs from the USA and Canada. A literature review was undertaken focussing on the extensive reporting of MOOCs through blogs, press releases as well as openly available reports. This identified current debates about new course provision, the impact of changes in funding and the implications for greater openness in higher education. The theory of disruptive innovation is used to help form the questions of policy and strategy that higher education institutions need to address.
Opening Education Beyond the Property Relation
Open Education, and specifically the OER movement, seeks to provide universal access to knowledge, undermining the historical enclosure and the increasing privatisation of the public education system. In this paper we examine this aspiration by submitting the implicit theoretical assumptions of Open Education to the test of critical political economy. We acknowledge the Open Education movement’s revolutionary potential but outline the inherent limitations of its current focus on the commons (property relations) rather than the social relations of capitalist production (wage work, the company) and because of this, argue that it will only achieve limited, rather than revolutionary, impact.
Mainstreaming Open Educational Practice – Recommendations for Policy
Open Educational Resources, and open education more generally, is considered to have huge potential to increase participation and educational opportunities at large and to promote widening participation and lifelong learning. At the same time the past decade has shown that openness in itself is not enough to unfold these potentials. A number of elements need to be taken into account in order to move from OER to Open Educational Opportunities. These elements and strategies have been the subject of a two year project, the Open Education Quality Initiative, OPAL, the findings are summarised in this paper. The intended audience of this report is policy makers in the field of education, and science and technology. On the basis of the experience of the Open Educational Quality Initiative we are arguing that the focus of OER work to date has largely been on access to and the availability of OER, We argue that t is important to shift the focus more to the actual open practice of using, reusing, or creating Open Educational Opportunities: Open Educational Practice.
How Open Education is Changing the Texture of Content
Schools are moving from creamy to chunky — but not in relation to cafeteria peanut butter. The change in texture is happening with content. Instruction that was structured linearly, captured in books that were all-inclusive monoliths with a predetermined progression for a uniform, somewhat “creamy” consistency, is shifting to newer forms of instructional content that are more “chunky,” beginning as a scattered landscape of digital pieces that are then assembled to support full courses. The trend, steady and apparently inexorable, is inspired by higher education, driven by financial pressures, propelled by foundations and the federal government, and enabled by technology.
How Open Education Can Transform Learning
As the open education movement grows, the ripple effects of what it means for teachers to take control of what they teach is being witnessed across all spectrums in education. Customizable content, sharing and becoming part of a community, and deconstructing entrenched ideologies about what constitutes quality learning materials — these are just a few paths that the open education movement is creating.
Long is worried that all the available resources online will get into the hands of those who already have means, leaving those who don’t even further behind. “Those who have leverage, power and resources are going to pull it off, and those who don’t will be further marginalized in terms of opportunity,” Long said. If the debate is tangled around issues like “public versus private versus charter, we’re going to wake up sooner rather than later with a massive discrepancy.”
The Power of Open
The Power of Open collects the stories of many creators. Some are like ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news organization that uses CC while partnering with the world’s largest media companies. Others like nomadic filmmaker Vincent Moon use CC licensing as an essential element of a lifestyle of openness in pursuit of creativity. The breadth of uses is as great as the creativity of the individuals and organizations choosing to open their content, art and ideas to the rest of the world.
As we look ahead, the field of openness is approaching a critical mass of adoption that could result in sharing becoming a default standard for the many works that were previously made available only under the all-rights-reserved framework. Even more exciting is the potential increase in global welfare from the use of Creative Commons’ tools and the increasing relevance of openness to the discourse of culture, education and innovation policy.
The Saylor Foundation – Free Education
The Saylor Foundation is pushing the open education movement forward and creating greater access to Open Educational Resources (OER). Saylor.org features over 200 free, self-paced, automated courses. While we do not confer degrees, we do offer the knowledge equivalent of thirteen popular disciplines.
We hire credentialed professors to create course blueprints and to locate, vet, and organize OER materials into a structured and intuitive format. Our consulting professors also create original OER content and link to freely posted copyrighted materials to fill in any gaps. Each course culminates with a final exam, and students receiving a passing grade can download a certificate of completion.
Our current focus is on the undergraduate college level with the goal of producing high course and program completion rates. We intend to focus on the primary, secondary, and post-graduate levels in the future.
Cómo crear tu propia Khan Academy
Salman Khan es el fundador de la Khan Academy, una organización educativa sin ánimo de lucro. En su página web puedes encontrar gratuitamente una colección de más de 2.700 microlecciones a través de videos tutoriales hospedados en YouTube.
Khan Academy, junto con MITx, Uncollege de Stanford o YouTube para Escuelas, confirman una tendencia tecnológica interesante en Educación. Los profesores, cada vez más, graban sus clases y las cuelgan en la nube para que sean accesibles a estudiantes en cualquier momento y en cualquier lugar.
International Initiatives Fuel Growth of Open Ed. Content
Initiatives in countries from South Africa to Vietnam are fueling the growth of open educational resources. Open educational resources are claiming a place in schools in a diverse array of countries.
South Africa’s Education Department is printing math and science textbooks produced from such resources for use in grades 10 through 12. In the Netherlands, the Ministry of Education has developed a platform called Wikiwijs for employing open resources. Vietnamese educators are translating such resources and creating their own to build a repository available for their country’s students.
“It’s interesting to watch this whole field of open education resources grow from embryonic to industry-challenging,” said Lisa Petrides, the executive director of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, a nonprofit research organization in Half Moon Bay, Calif., that created the OER Commons, a repository of open education resources.
