OpenCourseWare Consortium
Happy Festive Season
2012 In review This has been an exiting year for the OCW Consortium. Early in the year, our Board of Directors voted to enlarge the scope of our work to support the open education movement more generally and to focus on user experience. Membership requirements changed to reflect this shift; membership criteria are now demonstrated through expressing support for open education rather than production of OCW courses. This shows our commitment to using OER and open educational practices as well as to sharing materials.
December Newsletter 2012
The OCW Consortium recently partnered with OpenStudy to offer a Certificate of Participation to learners who achieve a certain level of proficiency through studying OCW materials. This project is in its pilot phase, and we’ll be looking to expand the project in 2013. See our announcements blog and www.openstudy.com/courses for more information.
The Consortium was also selected to be part of the US Commitment to the Equal Futures Partnership, an international cooperative effort to increase the economic and political We started the first annual open participation of women. Along education week in March 2012 with Creative Commons, we will with the goal of increasing be organizing an OER-STEM general awareness about open task force to examine ways that education, what resources are OER can support girls’ success in available, where projects are studying STEM subjects. See located around the world, and how people can make the most of (http://tinyurl.com/bsrqd6k) for materials and tools. Please join us more details. for Open Education Week 2013, In collaboration with the research 11-15 March. Showcase your group GICAC from the work in open education by contributing a video, webinar, or Universidad Politecnica de resource. Fill out the web form at Madrid (GICAC-UPM) and the www.openeducationweek.org by Universidad Particular Tecnica de 18 January 2013 and tell us how Loja (UPTL), the Consortium has embarked on a project to improve you would like to contribute. the search and discovery of open Participation is free and open. educational content, which will
enhance the ability of learners and educators to find and use OCW courses. To better show the impacts of open education worldwide, the OCW Consortium is gathering and sharing data on both the production of materials and the use of these resources, along with case studies of how OER are being used. You can find several case studies of OER in Community Colleges in our announcements (www.tinyurl.com/oercanyons, for example). Stay tuned in 2013 for summaries of this data and links to more case studies. Thank you for your continued support of the OCW Consortium. You can view the online version of the newsletter on ISSUU (OCWConsortium). As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions at newsletter@ocwconsortium.org or feedback@ocwconsortium.org With Best Wishes for 2013
Mary Lou Forward Executive Director OCW Consortium
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OER Around the World – Views from the OCW Consortium’s Board of Directors Overview of New Members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium in 2012 Reminders: OCWC Global 2013 & 2013 Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence (ACE) Proposals to host OCWC Global 2014, Happy Birthday to CC & New OCWC Members
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OER Around the World – Views from the OCW Consortium’s Board of Directors
Anka Mulder, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the Netherlands The board of TU Delft has decided to invest in Online Education and the development of MOOCs. Delft has given keynote speeches on Open and Online Education at major Dutch higher education conferences. We have also informed the government about the developments in this field. TU Delft has also strengthened ties with UNESCO Netherlands, working jointly on advancing OER nationally. The European Union will launch a programme on Open Education in 2014: “Opening up education” (http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/consult/open_en.htm). They are holding a consultation round now and all EU organisations and institutions are invited to respond. As a follow up to the currently ongoing EU OCW project (http://www.opencourseware.eu/), we would like to set up an EU STEM academic network using OER (http://www.opencourseware.eu/stem. We have already identified a number of partners.
Wei-I Lee, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan Taiwan OCWC (http://tocwc.nctu.edu.tw/) has 27 members, comprising 15% of all the universities in Taiwan. Members are adding approximately 300 new courses each year with 200 of these being complete videos and teaching materials. Furthermore, members have been working on standardization of Google Analytics to pool together for meaningful data. The OCW sites cumulatively get approximately 100,000 viewers each month; the university population in Taiwan is 1.2 million. TOCWC is interested in collaborating with universities in Taiwan to produce MOOCs and are looking into setting up a company that would start offering courses possibly in August 2013. In Mainland China, the 5-year plan released last year allocated 100M USD into OCW. This will include 200 top video courses, and course materials for another 1000 courses each year.
James Glapa-Grossklag, Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER), USA During 2012, there has been an active schedule of webinars, providing a rich array of professional development to faculty, staff, and administrators. Topics have included research on student outcomes, models for faculty training, accessibility for all students, and—of course—MOOCs. Presenters included community college faculty, staff, and administrators, as well as representatives from state offices of education and professional researchers. Community College conferences increasingly feature panel discussions and keynote presentations on OER. The CCCOER (http://oerconsortium.org/) advisory board meets regularly, developing a strong community of interest. Case studies of successful implementations of OER in community colleges are available on the OCWC website, providing examples of real cost savings and improved learning for our students. The number of community colleges that are members of the OCW Consortium has increased significantly over the past year.
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Catherine Ngugi, OER Africa, Kenya/South Africa OER Africa (http://www.oerafrica.org), a SAIDE initiative (http://www.saide.org.za/), continues to work with universities in Africa to build awareness on how open can met some of the challenges of delivering quality education to large and growing numbers, with limited physical and human resources. One such OER Africa project is AgShare, (http://www.oerafrica.org/agshare/AgShareHome/tabid/1290/Default.aspx), an agriculture OER project to link classroom study with practice by farmers, funded by the Gates Foundation. OER Africa continues to work on policies at the institutional level that allow greater collaboration and sharing of resources. We are also contributing to an IDRC (www.idrc.ca/) research project, looking at impact of OER in developing countries. SAIDE was recently awarded a Comic Relief grant for the African storybook project, focusing on early childhood literacy. Although there are lots of stories across the continent there are not many storybooks. Having lots of stories to read in their own language helps children develop literacy. The project will collect and share stories under open licenses in order to support literacy development. Murilo Matos Mendonca, UNISUL - Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina, Brazil OER have recently been included in a number of conferences and symposia in Brazil. The OCWC Symposium on Open Education assembled a countrywide audience and served to raise awareness as well as interest in open education among educational institutions and government (http://www.unisulvirtual.com.br/simposioOCWC/palestrantes_english.html). In policy, in September, Simão Pedro, Congressman of the State of São Paulo, discussed his OER Bill with the State Secretary of Education of São Paulo. The Bill proposes that all educational resources purchased or developed with public funds, be made available as OER (http://rea.net.br/site/pl-sobre-recursos-educacionais-abertos-e-apresentado-em-sao-paulo/). Finally, UNISUL is involved in a research group currently being put together with the purpose of looking into collaborative learning through OER. From 2013, procedures will be developed to validate non-formal learning acquired through OER/OCW. The OportUnidad project (http://www.oportunidadproject.eu/) has just released a publication called “Compendium OER: Cases from Latin America and Europe in Higher Education”. The Compendium can be downloaded from the OportUnidad website. Ignasi Labastida i Juan, Creative Commons, Spain The reuse of materials for educational purposes is going to be challenged in court after a couple of public universities in Spain have been sued by a collecting society. This is a great opportunity to show how to share by creating and using Open Educational Resources (OER). Both creators and users need to understand the importance of OER in order to advance building of an open knowledge society. We plan to use Open Education Week (www.openeducationweek.org) as a venue to educate about open licenses, open education and the value of OER. CC has turned 10 this year: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC10
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Mary Y. Lee, Tufts University, USA Open academic resources at Tufts (http://sites.tufts.edu/tuftsoer/) support and expand our University’s commitment to internationalism, active citizenship, and global civil society. The Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK) is an enterprise-level knowledge and curriculum management system designed for life and health sciences education and training. TUSK’s software is open source (opentusk.org) and will soon be available in French. TUSK is being used in the United States, India, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden, and is being planned for Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Thailand. Tufts has led OpenGeoportal (http://opengeoportal.org/), a collaboratively developed open source platform to gather and share large data assets in geo-spatial science, and hosts Selected Patient Information Resources in Asian Languages (SPIRAL http://spiral.tufts.edu/index.php) which provides high-quality Asian-language health information for non-English speakers and their health providers. The 2nd Sloan Summit (http://vimeo.com/35899334) on Open Access - Mission and Mandate was hosted by the Boston Library Consortium at Tufts in January 2012, for university administrators to explore open access issues and how they are transforming teaching, research, and collaboration. Edmundo Tovar, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain Together with researchers from Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja, UPM has recently finalized a study on the impact of Open Education Resources (OER) and the OpenCourseWare (OCW) in Spanish and Latin American universities. The research project was supported financially through the Spanish Ministry of Education. OCW initiatives in Spain and Latin America have been analyzed both from the point of view of OCW/OER usability and from the perspective of managers/content creators of OCW projects/OCW. Serendipty (http://serendipity.utpl.edu.ec/), a project aimed at improving discoverability of OER/OCW, is moving ahead with the support of the OCW Consortium. We are also working on a visualization tool to be able to show graphically data about OCW and other OER initiatives around the world (http://serendipity.utpl.edu.ec/map). As part of the EU OCW project, we have produced a report on the impact of OCW on European higher education institutions, which will be available on the project website http://opencourseware.eu/. We are also working on including OER in engineering education. The 2013 Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) will include the use of OER as one of the conference themes. Furthermore, the IEEE Transactions on Education has issued a call for papers for its special issue on “Open Educational Resources (OER): Original Experiences Using Open Course Ware and OER. MOOCs have also had a considerable impact on Spanish Higher Education. UNIVERSIA, Telefonica and UNED have recently launched a platform called “Miriada X”. The platform hosts open education content offered to Ibero-American academics from the UNIVERSIA network. Academics can use the platform to create and teach MOOCs. UPM will contribute several courses to Miriada X in the near future. Finally, UPM OCW Office will transform into Open Education Office in 2013, a step considered as a natural evolution in open education by other Spanish universities.
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Bakary Diallo, The African Virtual University, Kenya/Senegal Following the successful completion of the Phase I of the Multinational project, which resulted in the creation of 219 open resources in English, French and Portuguese, the African Development Bank approved funding for the AVU Multinational Project Phase II to build on the project’s initial successes. This grant strengthens the capacity of the AVU to establish distance and eLearning infrastructure in selected partner institutions, develop and deliver quality ICT-integrated programs in mathematics and science teacher education, computer science and peace and conflict resolution. It will help the AVU to launch its research and development agenda with a focus on mobile learning, and to scale up its OER initiative (http://oer@avu.org). The grant also supports gender mainstreaming through awarding scholarships to women in science programs. Phase II of the Multinational project is being implemented in 27 partner institutions in 22 countries across the African continent. Launch meetings have begun for the project, which include OER workshops. Six OER workshops have been conducted to date in Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan and South Sudan.
Overview of New Members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium in 2012
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1 New Member: Australia, Belgium, Panama, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates; 2 New Members: Brazil, China, Indonesia, Italy, South Korea, Mexico, Netherlands; 14 New Members: United States Total number of new members in 2012: 36; Total number of OCWC members: 274 For more information about OCWC members, please visit: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/en/members/members
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Call for Participation: 2nd Open Education Week Open Education Week is a fiveday celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its purpose is to raise awareness of both the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources is free and open to anyone. The Open Education Week Organizing Committee invites your participation in the second annual Open Education Week, 11-15 March 2013, to be marked by online and in-person events around the world. Contribute a virtual tour of your open education project, a webinar, links to resources, host a local event or propose something creative. To contribute, simply fill out the web form at www.openeducationweek.org by 18 January 2013. All contributions must use an open license that allows for reuse and modification. Open Education Week is coordinated by the OCW Consortium.
Open Education Week: Some Frequently Asked Questions What topics will be covered during Open Education Week? This week is dedicated to raising awareness about open educational resources, open educational practices, open policies, open access, open data – any topic related to open education. Open education refers to educational practices that increase access to high quality education and openly licensed educational materials that allow reuse and modification. What is a project showcase? What are the requirements? Provide a pre-recorded informational video of your project, work, or organization. This should be focused on the work you’re doing in open education and designed for a general audience. What are the guidelines for a webinar? Webinars are well suited for topics of general interest, such as what’s happening in open education in a particular area or country, new projects, or topics that offer discussion possibilities. We also welcome webinars that offer training opportunities in areas such as open content licensing, online tools/open sources software applications for creating or repurposing OER, and more. How do I contribute basic resources? Create or share existing text- or video-based, downloadable information that’s helpful in understanding open education or in implementing open educational practices. What do you mean by a local event? Sponsor or host an in-person event in your local area during the week of 11-15 March 2013. This could be a community discussion, a forum on open education, a challenge and/or a celebration. Make a difference! For detailed information on how to participate in OEW please visit www.openeducationweek.org or email us at info@openeducationweek.org
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Reminder: Call for Proposals for OCWC Global 2013 Conference is Open! OCWC Global 2013, hosted by APTIKOM Indonesia, will be held in Bali, Indonesia May 810, 2013. Partnering with the OCWC and APTIKOM for the realization of conference goals is a local organizing team, which includes the National ICT Council of Indonesia, Ministry of Education and Culture, Ministry of Information and Communication, and the Indonesian Open University. Held annually, OCWC Global reunites the OCW/OER community for three days of showcasing new projects, debating issues of common concern, and exchanging useful practices in matters such as pedagogy, policy and technology. The OpenCourseWare Consortium invites session proposals for the 2013 global conference. We encourage submissions for sessions that highlight learning beyond borders, summarize research, showcase best practices, discuss issues facing the community, and encourage thinking about the future direction of “open” learning.
In keeping with the theme of the conference, Learning Beyond Borders – Delivering Quality Education to Your Fingertips, we particularly welcome proposals that integrate accounts of OER’s role in broadening access to education via policy, accreditation, assessment and improving quality. There will be 3 conference tracks: 1. Collaboration in Open Education
Reminder: 2013 Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence Call for Nominations is Open! The Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence recognize outstanding individual contributions to the OCW/OER movement, exemplary OCW member sites and excellent individual course presentations. A panel of voting members will select ACE site and course winners from finalists culled by the award committee. Individual winners will be selected by a vote of the board of directors. Nominations for individuals, sites
2. Accreditation and Assessment of OER-based learning 3. Expanding the reach of OER The Deadline for Proposals is 31 December 2012. Registration for the conference is now Open as well. For more information about submitting session proposals and to register for the conference visit: http://conferences.ocwconsortium .org
and courses will be accepted through January 14, 2013 and may be submitted through the following page (http://ocwconsortium.org/ace) or by e-mailing ace@ocwconsortium.org. Visit the above web page for complete information on preliminary criteria, rules and eligibility. The OCW ACE’s will be presented at the next global OpenCourseWare Consortium meeting in Bali, Indonesia, May 8-10, 2013. For information about the 2011 and 2012 ACE winners please visit: http://ocwconsortium.org/en/com munity/ace
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Call for Proposals to Host OCWC 2014 Global Conference is Closed! Thank you to all who submitted proposals to host OCWC 2014 Global Conference. The Board of Directors of the OCW Consortium will make a final decision about the 2014 OCWC Global conference location during their Board meeting in January 2013 and new location for the 2014 OCWC Global will be announced during the 2013 Global conference in Bali, Indonesia in May 2013.
Happy 10th Birthday to Creative Commons The first Creative Commons licenses were released 10 years ago. The Global Open Education Community and the OpenCourseWare Consortium would like to congratulate Creative Commons for their extremely important role in enabling the gift of sharing of educational resources openly and freely. Happy Birthday CC! For more information, visit: http://10.creativecommons.org/
We welcome these new members to the Consortium Institutional Universitas Terbuka - Indonesian Open University (http://www.ut.ac.id/), Indonesia Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro- PUC Rio (http://www.puc-rio.br/index.html), Brazil Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi (http://www.unimarconi.it), Italy Organizational GUIDE - Global Universities in Distance Education (http://www.guideassociation.org), Italy
Please visit our website for news links and blogs to keep up with what is happening in OER around the world. Better yet, you can like us on Facebook (OCWConsortium) or follow us on Twitter (OCW News) to be updated in real time. If you have something to share email us at: newsletter@ocwconsortium.org or feedback@ocwconsortium.org and let us know! Unless otherwise noted, the OpenCourseWare Consortium December 2012 Newsletter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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Activities of the OpenCourseWare Consortium are supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, member dues, and contributions from our sustaining members: The African Virtual University | Fundação Getulio Vargas - FGV Online | Delft University of Technology| Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium | Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health | Korea OpenCourseWare Consortium| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Netease Information Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. | Open Universiteit (the Netherlands) | Tecnológico de Monterrey| Taiwan OpenCourseWare Consortium |Tufts University | UNIVERSIA| Universidad Politécnica de Madrid | University of California, Irvine | University of Michigan