Open Textbook Proof-of-Concept via Connexions
To address the high cost of textbooks, Rice University?s Connexions and the Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP) collaborated to develop a proof-of-concept free and open textbook. The proof-of-concept served to document a workflow process that would support adoption of open textbooks. Open textbooks provide faculty and students with a low cost alternative to traditional publishers... more
Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability
In an attempt to understand the potential of OER for change and sustainability, this paper presents the results of an informal survey of active and inactive collections of online educational resources, emphasizing data related to collection longevity and the project attributes associated with it. Through an analysis of the results of this survey, in combination with other surveys of OER... more
Incentives and Disincentives for Use of Open Courseware.
This article examines Utah residents' views of incentives and disincentives for the use of OpenCourseWare (OCW), and how they fit into the theoretical framework of perceived innovation attributes established by Rogers (1983). Rogers identified five categories of perceived innovation attributes: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. A survey... more
From Open Content to Open Course Models: Increasing Access and Enabling Global Participation in Higher Education
Two of the major challenges to international students' right of access to higher education are geographical/economic isolation and academic literacy in English (Carey, 1999; Hamel, 2007). The authors propose that adopting open course models in traditional universities, through blended or online delivery, can offer benefits to the institutions and to the open education movement itself, in... more
The Use of Metadata for Educational Resources in Digital Repositories: Practices and Perspectives
The wide availability of educational resources is a common objective for universities, libraries, archives and other knowledge intensive institutions. Although generic metadata specifications (such as Dublin Core) seem to fulfill the need for documenting web-distributed objects, educational resources demand a more specialized treatment and characterization. In this article we focus on the... more
OER in Developing Countries: Towards Meaningful Partnership
A keynote address by Catherine Ngugi at the Open Learning Conference 2009 in Nottingham, UK, November 2009. The focus of this address was that OER presents an opportunity to overhaul how we think about and practice higher education - and how education as a collaborative endeavour - a cornerstone of the OER movement - is far more likely to result in success than going it alone. The video... more
CC Licenses and Trademarks: A Guide for Organizational OER Creators and Distributors
This primer is a guide to understanding the relationship between your rights as a copyright owner using Creative Commons licenses (particularly CC BY) and your trademark rights within the context of open educational resources (?OER?). Many people in the OER community are under the mistaken impression that copyright is the only tool at their disposal to protect and control their work and that... more
UCT Educational Technology Policy Document
The purpose of this document is to make explicit UCT's position on educational technology within the institution. The document also suggests how the principles expressed in these position statements may be put into practice. more
Harnessing Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
In this report the Committee for Economic Development examines higher education through the lens of openness. Their goal was to understand the potential impact of greater openness on colleges and universities. Like other service industries such as finance or entertainment, higher education is rooted in information?its creation, analysis, and transmission and the development of the skills... more
Access to Open Educational Resources: Report of a UNESCO OER Community Discussion
UNESCO's international Community on Open Educational Resources has been active since 2005. It connects some 900 individuals in 109 countries to share information and discuss issues surrounding the production and use of Open Educational Resources ? web-based materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research. The community returned to the issue of access... more
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