Archive for the ‘Open learning’ Category
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 Higher Education Monopoly Is Crumbling
Many factors explain the endurance of higher education institutions—the ascent of the knowledge economy, their crucial role in upper-middle class acculturation, our peculiar national enthusiasm for college sports—but the single greatest asset held by traditional colleges and universities is their exclusive franchise for the production and sale of higher education credentials.
In the last few months, however, that monopoly has begun to crumble. New organizations are being created to offer new kinds of degrees, in a manner and at a price that could completely disrupt the enduring college business model. The question is: Which colleges and universities will be the G.E. of the twenty-first century, and which will be as forgotten as U.S. Leather?
Read also: Khan Academy
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.
In an Open-Source Society – Creativity and Innovation
The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation. And it’s a philosophy that has begun to change how we think about creativity itself. This technical strategy has led to the creation of a gigantic network of far-flung innovators who develop standards with one another and share the products of their work in the form of free and open-source software.
I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.
Neoteny, one of my favorite words, means the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood: idealism, experimentation and wonder. In this new world, not only must we behave more like children, we also must teach the next generation to retain those attributes that will allow them to be world-changing, innovative adults who will help us reinvent the future.
Screen test for the online classroom
The Khan Academy website allows pupils to follow a structured course through a subject, with banks of videos and questions to answer, in a growing number of languages. It’s not a replacement for school or teachers, says Mr Sinha. And in fact the academy is setting up its own real-world summer school and is working with schools in the San Francisco area in California.
But it does raise some big questions about the future functions of schools and universities – not least when US colleges are charging students $50,000 per year. The other striking aspect of the Khan Academy equation is the reach of such a small team of people. There are volunteers, but as of November 2011, there are only 20 full-time staff. Millions of students, scattered around the world, are being served by a staff the size of a primary school.
What are the Key Challenges for the OER Movement?
The OLNet project is assembling a list of the key challenges facing to Open Educational Resources. They ask the question, “What are the Key Challenges for the OER Movement?” in their blog. This is my response.
I think that the single largest challenge in OER is the complete lack of a standardized interchange format and free/open software to create, manage, edit, and remix open educational content.
Until we have rich and powerful editing tools in the hands of the people creating the content, we will never reach “escape velocity” in the OER space. We will continue to pay large sums of money to accumulate large repositories of expensively gathered/produced materials that are uneditable.
The future of education will be open and distributed
Distributed Learning – Any learning that allows instructor, students, and content to be located in different locations so that instruction and learning occur independent of time and place; often used synonymously with the term “Distance learning”. Let’s take a ‘T.R.I.P. into the Future’ looking at some changes that are shifting learning in a way not possible just a few years ago. Here are 4 trends that education is moving towards: Greater Transparency, greater Responsibility, greater Individualization and greater Permanence.
Now I’ll add to that ‘Open and Distributed’… but what I’m ultimately talking about is greater Individualization with greater Responsibility on both schools and students. Within 5 years, every student from Grade 6 or 7 right up to Grade 12 will be involved in some level of distributed learning. I’m also not just talking about Distributed Learning but, more specifically…
OER university
The OER university is a virtual collaboration of like-minded institutions committed to creating flexible pathways for OER learners to gain formal academic credit.
The OER university aims to provide free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials with pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognised education institutions. It is rooted in the community service and outreach mission to develop a parallel learning universe to augment and add value to traditional delivery systems in post-secondary education. Through the community service mission of participating institutions we will open pathways for OER learners to earn formal academic credit and pay reduced fees for assessment and credit.
