In this issue... OER Policies from around the world Pg.2 Interview with Prof. Diallo, Rector, African Virtual University Pg.4 Interview with Victor Vuchic, Hewlett Foundation Pg.5 Interest Groups Pg.6 Member news Pg.7
OpenCourseWare Consortium
June 2010
A Message from the Executive Director The OpenCourseWare movement is in the midst of exciting times. Collectively, our members have produced just over 13,000 OCW courses, available in nearly 20 languages. Discussion of Open Educational Resources is taking place in a variety of venues, around the world, from conferences to government agencies. There are more and more signs that the idea is starting to take hold in the educational mainstream. For it to really take hold, many people believe that it must be featured in educational policy, from the institutional to governmental levels. In this newsletter, we feature articles and interviews with policy makers and thought leaders from around the world to showcase the ways that OER and OCW are
being incorporated into educational policy. You‟ll read about efforts in Brazil, the Netherlands, Korea, and across the African continent. Additionally, videos and presentations from the OCW Consortium‟s global conference on Educational Policy and OpenCourseWare, which took place from May 5-7 in Hanoi, Vietnam, are available on the conference website at http:// conference.ocwconsortium.org. The OCW Consortium will help keep you up to date with what‟s happening in the field through monthly news updates, quarterly newsletters, webinars, our blog, and discussions in Communities of Interest. Within the next few weeks, you‟ll see the launch of the Consortium‟s new website at www.ocwconsortium.org. We‟ll
be featuring projects and interesting developments from around the world. The Communities of Interest will be integrated into the website, making it easier for you to find and connect with others who share your interests. We‟ve enhanced the search and browse features to make it easier for users to find courses. As always, we are happy to hear from you, and we encourage you to send feedback, questions, ideas, and projects you‟d like to share to feedback@ocwconsortium.org. Best wishes,
Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director OCW Consortium
OER Policies Around the World
The theme for the OCW Global 2010 in Hanoi was Educational Policy and OpenCourseWare. As we approach ten years of OpenCourseWare, many exciting initiatives have started around the world, and at different levels. In some places, we witness grassroots movements in which volunteers take charge of the project, whereas in other places, it is the government that leads the initiative. Regardless of who has taken the initiative, policies at different levels fueled the movement to move forward. This issue of the OCW Consortium newsletter examines a selection of policy examples from around the world. After we take a look at policies, Dr. Bakary Diallo of the African Virtual University and Mr. Victor Vuchic of the Hewlett Foundation share their views on OER and policy. These two interviews shed light on the ways policies have impacted the movement in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Brazil Policies around OER in Brazil have taken a grassroots approach to create governance in OER. Instead of a centralized policy implemented by the government, there have been efforts to bring different parties of interest together to increase awareness. According to Carolina Rossini, a key figure in leading the OER movement in Brazil, the past two years have seen significant progress in awareness raising, community and alliance building, and policy recommendations. This progress may be measured by the clear support OER is receiving from the political community, specifically represented by some Brazilian
publicly funded educational material be available as OER. Additionally, future action should include elements of a decentralized approach for capacity building around OER design, and community building. Both strategies should be pursued at the same time for a successful emergence of OER in Brazil. The Netherlands Policy Imp... by knezovjb
Federal Congress representatives and members of the Education Secretaries of States and City Secretaries of States. Additionally, the academic community has shown increasing interest in being part of and contributing to the rise of OER in Brazil. These accomplishments do not come without challenges, however. There is still a clear need for capacity building, interoperability standards, and awareness raising with regard to OER design and implementation. Examples include correct appropriation of Open Licensing schemes for educational materials and translation and localization of projects. Additionally, support from some within the political community does not mean things will automatically change. Rather, it means that a door was opened and that more action is immediately called for. Thus, future action focused on a centrally-coordinated approach of capacity building and advocacy for implementation of the project recommendations is both needed and timely. A specific aim for Brazil is the transformation of a law so that all
The Netherlands has already invested much in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure, so the recent focus of the government has been to foster more use and development of the „softâ€&#x; side of ICT. Whereas Dutch hardware for education has been some of the best in the world, use of ICT for educational purposes has not been as sophisticated. The government has a repository for research and educational materials and also has set up SURF, a platform for universities to exchange information. And yet, Dutch innovation in use of ICT lags behind Scandinavian countries, the U.S., and Singapore. The government is very keen on developing policies to meet this challenge. Experiments in open educational resources came in 2006 when the government decided to support the OpenCourseWare project at the Open Universiteit. The Open Universiteit has since been working closely with the government and also with TU Delft, another early adapter of OCW in the Netherlands. Since then, there has been increasing interest from individual teachers to open more content, and the Education Council has made a recommendation to the Parliament to
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make more use of OER for innovation of education. In 2008, Ronald Plasterk, the Minister of Education, initiated Wikiwijs, a national repository of digital teaching and learning materials published under open licenses. Wikiwijs started in primary and secondary education and has expanded to higher education. The Ministry has the following objectives in starting OER projects: extend options for customized education, increase the quality of education through more up-to-date learning materials, make the profession more attractive by increasing teacher involvement in the development and use of OER. As the actual results and impact of OER are measured for a better implementation of the project, we can look forward to having OER innovate and improve education via a government-initiated project. Korea Korea is similar to the Netherlands in many ways when it comes to policies on ICT in education. Korea also boasts highly advanced infrastructure coming from government investment and densely populated land that is relatively small in area. Investment in ICT for education also started in the 80s when hardware was provided to schools, and extensive IT training was provided for teachers. In the new millennium, the importance of quality digital educational material became apparent, and the Ministry of Education invested much money with the goal of building a strong elearning system for all levels of schools. The institution that has played a central role in implementing the Ministry‟s policies is KERIS, the Korea Education and Research Information Service. KERIS has worked with schools and universities to create more quality e-learning content. Although not necessarily built on the concept of „openness‟, these course materials and tutorials from primary and secondary education are easily accessible on the web at no cost. The government‟s project for open educational resources started with K-
OCW in 2007 when it launched a website to provide all e-learning content produced by government grants as OER. There now are over 700 courses on this site. The Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology saw the importance of supporting OER as a part of educational innovation, and in order to empower individual universities to build capacity in open content generation, the Ministry has made OER a part of the ACE Project. The ACE Project awards ten universities extensive grants for efforts in improving the quality of education. Interestingly enough, plans for the operation of an open educational resources project is one of the evaluation criteria. Of the ten universities selected, two are members of the OCW Consortium. Others, although not yet members, have submitted proposals for how to start an OCW program or how to modify their existing digital contents to fit the idea of „openness‟.
And now, for reforming the quality of education, the government is turning its attention to open educational content. The Ministry of Education has been very active in setting up a project named NEXUS, a national repository that collects open content from around the world, localizes the content, and modifies the content to be used by people who seek inexpensive education. Anyone can take courses and pay for evaluation services. This project was spearheaded by APTIKOM, which is an affiliation of 700 computer science departments offering varying degrees of quality in the education they give to their students. The NEXUS model not only aims at offering inexpensive education for all, but it also provides the means to reach a certain standard of quality in higher education. This ambitious project strives to improve the quality of education itself and to broaden the range of those who can benefit from higher education.
Joel Speaks on Computer Science Capstone Projects opensourceway
ManorLabs, City of Manor, Texas Our examples so far have been the efforts of federal governments. In the U.S., the education system is mandated by state governments more than by the federal government, and this is why there are more interesting projects run by local governments. Among the many interesting projects, one recent development is worth a closer examination. ManorLabs, from the City of Manor, Texas, is a platform for which open content is provided for the purpose of strengthening continuing education for citizens. ManorLabs started on belief that Gov‟t 2.0 cannot succeed without catering to the educational needs of citizens.
Indonesia Indonesia‟s environment for internet infrastructure differs from those in the Netherlands and Korea. Whereas the aforementioned countries are small in area and densely populated, allowing for an optimal environment for internet infrastructure, Indonesia is a country of 2 billion people and 20,000 islands spread out over more than 5 million km2. The disparity in quality of education in different areas has been and is still one of the biggest problems that the Ministry of Education has to tackle. In the late 90‟s, when governments of various Asian countries were promoting the use of open source software programs, Indonesia can be arguably said to have been the only government that was successful.
OpenCourseWare Consortium June 2010
Manor Labs will be creating courses in collaboration with the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. Course content production will be open to many who are interested in contributing, and there are many other local governments showing interest in participating. The City of Manor only has about 6500 in its population, but the impact it‟s creating will reach out to considerably more people.
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Interview with Prof. Bakary Diallo Dr. Bakary Diallo is the rector of African Virtual University, whose goal is to be the Leading Pan-African Open, Distance and eLearning Network. He came to office in 2007, and since then he has been working towards creating programs that are Africa-based and in alignment with capacity building for African institutions. One of his focus points has been on Open Educational Resources, and Igor Lesko of the OpenCourseWare Consortium met with Dr. Diallo to hear more about his strategies and policies in OER.
Igor: How does the AVU facilitate partnerships among different institutions across Africa? Bakary: We are a network. The AVU was created as a World Bank project. Later on, it became a Pan-African organization, meaning that the charter of AVU was signed by 5 countries. As a network, we facilitate access to higher education through the innovative use of Information and communication technologies. For instance, building the capacity of our partner institutions to develop or adapt their eLearning content, put it online and teach it—this is part of our work. In the process, we bring the countries together and promote regional integration. Through this project we found out that we have created a community of scholars at universities that otherwise, before, were not talking to each other, and now they are like a big family. To us, it is an added value to just implement eLearning centers and provide capacity for them to do eLearning. In this project, we collectively decided to create a Virtual Consortium for Teacher Education to make sure that we will keep on working together even after the funds end. Another way of working with our network is that the AVU is developing AVU‟s own courses. AVU used to procure courses from the West. We have changed this system. We are developing African content. This is not to say that foreign content is not good, but rather that localizing content is important. It is important to develop content that is embedded in our realities and context; content that can train Africans so that they can make a difference in their continent. We are developing the content ourselves with our partner institutions. When we deliver the content we seek what we call Joint Accreditation. For instance, this would be a diploma
or certificate program with the AVU and the Open University of Tanzania or with the AVU and the Universitė Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal. One way we also work in our network is by raising awareness about e-learning. Another way, as you know, is through Open Educational Resources. We are building our online repository. We are going to put online over 200 courses in Mathematics and Science and have developed 73 modules so far. All the modules will be available in three languages. We already have a community in the 10 countries whom we will ask for active use, remix and share. We believe in community. Having online resources is one thing, but another challenge is using them and using them effectively. Igor: Many in the OER movement believe that integrating openness into policy at both the institutional and national levels is essential to success. Can you talk about AVU’s experience in this regard? Bakary: That is critical. To me, Open Educational Resources are resources, period. They are open but after that, they are resources. Resources are to be used. But by whom, and how, and why? It is one thing to have a capacity to develop a lot of resources licensed under Creative Commons. But the bottom line is who is using it and why are they using it. So it is very important to work from the needs of a particular group. The need of content in Africa is important. The content at most universities is outdated. It is extremely important to create and provide good content to this university, but how? You must know the needs of the universities, ministries of education, ministry of higher education, and a particular country. If you then develop
OpenCourseWare Consortium June 2010
curriculum, it is more likely that they will use it and it will make sense. That‟s why it is important to mainstream it with policies. Policy is extremely important to me and to all the activities of the AVU. We like to deal with the leadership of the country. The ministries and vicechancellors from institutions must show leadership. At the policy level, it is extremely important to mainstream the development and use of content into the local needs, and that goes through the policies. Where we have strong leadership in universities or in countries, and when they tell us what exactly they need, it works. To me, policy integration is key. Igor: Do you see the creation of OER/OCW through partnerships as part of AVU's future strategies? Bakary: For our future strategy, we would like to have a stronger Open Education component. It makes us more attractive in terms of universities coming to the AVU. Sustaining an OER website is difficult. The way we see sustaining it is that the website will make us, as an organization, more relevant. When we develop content, mostly with all our partners, we lobby to have the content licensed under creative commons licenses. This adds value to the AVU and we think it will bring us sustainability by attracting more partners to come to us. We need strong African institutions spearheading the development of African content and putting it online. Africa needs to contribute. We are looking at working with partners both around the world and in Africa in order to realize the economy of scale and to learn from each other, but my plans are to have a stronger OER team at AVU.
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Interview with Victor Vuchic The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a leader in fostering open educational resources for the past 10 years. The Foundation’s Education program recently went through the process of re-focusing its strategy. Mary Lou Forward of the OCW Consortium talked with Victor Vuchic, Program Officer for Open Educational Resources at the Hewlett Foundation about this strategy and about his views on the OER movement.
Mary Lou: Can you briefly describe the Hewlett Foundation’s new approach in the Education Program? Victor: The new strategy features three major areas. The first and largest is our deeper learning strategy, which seeks to enhance the quality of what is being taught and learned in school, including higherorder thinking and cognitive knowledge. By higher-order thinking, we mean meta-cognition, problemsolving, collaboration, critical thinking and self-directed learning. There are many good teachers already teaching these skills, but there‟s no tracking or accountability presently. We want to formalize this and make sure all students, from primary school through higher ed, are getting these important skills. This work is focused on education in the United States. The second-largest area is OER strategy. We will be continuing to support OER infrastructure at a global level for Kindergarten through life-long learning. We will support key institutions and key projects that move the field forward and have a strong positive impact on the OER field. The third area is a focus on education in California. We will be working with California schools and organizations to improve the access to and quality of education throughout the state. Mary Lou: Do you see overlap among the focal areas? Victor: Absolutely. We see OER as one route to how we implement and scale technologies that support deeper learning. There are a number of ways to go about this, from creating OER/OCW on these skills, to student-produced material that actively engages them in both learning and material creation, as well as formally-produced materials
by recognized experts in these areas. We also see open learning environments as important to deeper learning and OER. These environments often rely on OER for content and can produce interesting materials that become OER. An example of this is the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which is creating an open database of species tracking with contributions from students around the state. Scientists then use this data for their research. This promotes applied critical thinking as well as knowledge acquisition in a student-centered approach. Assessment and credit are also overlap areas. Though not much work has been done on models for gaining credit through OER, assessments that focus on knowledge acquisition over seat time are part of the deeper-learning strategy. Mary Lou: What do you think will move the OER field forward? Victor: We need to continue to work on increasing access and supporting knowledge for all. This includes generating and promoting examplars of quality, looking at the distribution mechanisms, and working to integrate the distribution channels for easy access. Anther important aspect of OER is its contribution to improving teaching and learning. We need to create and showcase innovative models that highlight how open is different than closed, how OER are used and how OER can impact pedagogy. We also want to support research and evaluation that can demonstrate this point. We're also working to broaden the field and make it more robust, bring in diverse funding, and to institutionalize OER. In higher ed, this means proper incentives like tenure credit for publishing openly.
OpenCourseWare Consortium June 2010
At the governmental level, this means modeling open by various agencies publishing openly, and having the government consider OER in its educational strategy. Mary Lou: What demonstrations of the impact of OER do you think would be most helpful? Victor: It would be great to see studies that integrate the data with the content, such as tracking learning outcomes. We need to track what people are actually using and how they‟re using it, and then use the data gathered to improve the materials available. It would be very interesting to see more studentdriven models of OER use, such as peer-to-peer learning, and to have studies that show how and why students are using OER. Mary Lou: What’s your assessment of the current state of OER/OCW? Victor: OER overall is successful beyond expectations. In many ways this was a big, bold experiment. When we now look now at things like the OCW Consortium, MIT OpenCourseWare, or iTunes U that draw heavily on OER materials, the reach and impact is very impressive. Additionally, the fact that there are so many discussions at government level shows how far we have come. The field needs to continue to evolve in some significant ways, however. We haven‟t really hit on many successful models to evaluate and signal quality. Search and discovery is a big challenge that requires more work. The movement is in the process of crossing the chasm from a successful movement on the edges of education to integrating into educational systems. . Another thing that needs more attention is crossinstitutional collaboration. I would really like to see more cross-platform, cross-institutional collaboration.
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Communities of Interest
Interest groups The Consortium serves as a network for individuals and institutions committed to propagating the movement through collaborative efforts. In the time since we asked for participation in Communities of Interest back in March, there have been discussions on various topics here and there. The platform for the discussions is at http:// ocwconsortium.ning.com, and this platform will soon be integrated with the Consortium website, allowing for single login. For communities of interest, please visit the ning network and participate in the groups that have already formed: OCW in Developing Countries, Primary and Secondary Education, Policies and OCW/OER, OCW for Business, Technology in OCW, OCW in Community Colleges, and OER Health. If you do not see an area representing your interests, please contact meena@ocwconsortium.org and let us know how you plan to lead a group. Also, there are several working groups for immediate projects, and we are looking for people to participate in the Toolkit working group. If you are interested in contributing in making a guidebook on how to start an OCW project, please send us an email. A New Working Group: Derivatives Tracking “Who are the users of OpenCourseWare, and what are they doing with it?� is a question to we all are trying to answer. This question can also phrased so as to ask what the impact of this movement is. Sukon Kanchanaraksa from Johns Hopkins School of Public
Health has been attempting to track derivatives to find out who and how people are using and remixing the content, and he would like to expand this to a community-driven activity. Until the technology arrives to automatically track all derivative works of OCW, we may have to do it manually. If you can help with finding derivatives, or if you have an idea on how this should be done on the Consortium level, please let us know. We would like to form a working group to launch a project in tracking derivatives to see where it can go. Please email meena@ocwconsortium.org if you are interested in participating. We will start the working group with an online roundtable discussion in July.
OCW Search Application Although it is the individual champions who make things happen in this community, our members come from institutions, whether they are academic or corporate. I would like to introduce a very interesting project developed by an individual. Dr. Pierre Far developed an OCW Search engine so that average users can have a better tool for finding OCW to fit their needs. He recently developed an OCW Search API that other developers can build upon to make interesting applications. This can be developed as a mobile application or otherwise. If you are interested in developing an OCW Search application, please check out http://www.ocwsearch.com/api.
OCW Consortium Global 2010 E-Proceedings : the second best thing to being there in person The OCW Consortium Global Meeting in Hanoi had many exciting presentations and brought forth discussion of the many issues we face in the community. Despite the tight economic situation, we had our biggest turnout this year internationally, and it was an opportunity to witness how the community is maturing. If you did not make it to Hanoi in person, you can still catch some of the excitement through the e-proceedings booklet. You can find links to the articles, presentations and videos from the Conference. You can also view some pictures and hear what the Vietnamese media said about us. You may be missing out on the ambiance and the fun times at the karaoke, but I am sure that you will be able to feel the passion and excitement we experienced at the Conference.
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Member News and Updates
Michigan State University pilots Latin American OER Michigan State University recently launched Latin America Learning, a repository for open educational resources aimed at educating stakeholders at various levels. This is a pilot project of MSU's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, which is working with MSUglobal Learning Ventures to develop an effective platform for sharing knowledge. "MSU fosters on-the-ground solutions and scholarship with students, faculty and colleagues around the world," said Chris Geith, assistant provost and executive director of MSUglobal. "Open Educational Resources enable us to have an even greater impact by inviting everyone to engage with us by redistributing and remixing these materials for their own purposes." Latin America Learning currently provides resources from MSU, Cornell University, Tulane University, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales of the Autonomous University of Yucatan, the Integrated Family Development System in Yucatán, CIESAS-Sureste, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and Universidade Federal da Bahía. Anyone who can help in expanding the resources is welcome. Universidad 2.0 It seems that much is going on in Latin America these days. Universidad 2.0 took place at the National University of Columbia on June 4-5 in Bogota, Columbia. There were two sessions dedicated to open educational resources. Ignasi Labastida from UOC, a board
member of the OCW Consortium, spoke about OER in general, and Michel Bauwens from the University of Amsterdam spoke about P2P production and the future of education. Both spoke about OCW as an important example in their talks. The conference had five remote sites: four in Columbia and one in Argentina, showing a great interest in e-learning and OER from the education community . Creative Commons Asia 2010 Creative Commons Asia 2010 was held in Seoul, Korea on June 4-5 . The theme was “Open for Innovation”. There were talks on business, education, and government, and it was a chance for all to get together and talk about the use of open licenses for digital content. Meena Hwang of the OCW Consortium spoke on the education panel to discuss ways to promote and collaborate on producing open educational resources . Open License Guidelines from P2PU Peer to Peer University has published the Official Guide to Choosing an Open License for those who have made the decision to use an open license but are not sure which open license would be the best fit for the particular project. The document can be downloaded at http://p2pu.org/license. Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Conference MERLOT, along with the Sloan Consortium and MoodleMoot, will hold the 3rd Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Conference in San Jose, CA from July 20 to 23 .
You may register to be there in person or virtually. Click here for more information. Registration Opens for OLE General Assembly; This Year’s Theme: ‘What Works?’ The second annual OLE General Assembly will be held on October 1115 in Kigali, Rwanda with discussions that center around what is known, what needs to be known and how we can know about scalable approaches to achieving Quality Universal Basic Education for marginalized children around the world. The early registration rate is at $400, and a preliminary schedule of sessions is available at http:// www.ole.org. Asia OCW 2010 to be held in Taipei The 2nd Asia OCW Conference will be held in Taipei, Taiwan. In order to serve the broader OER community in Asia, the name of the conference has been expanded to the 2010 Asia Regional OCW and Open Education Conference. The 2010 conference is co-hosted by the Taiwan Chiao-Tung University and Taiwan OpenCourseWare Consortium from November 1st to 2nd, 2010. The call for proposals remains open until August 15th. Open Ed 2010 in Barcelona The 7th Annual Open Education Conference will be held in Barcelona from Nov. 2-4 with the theme of OER: Impact and Sustainability. More information is available at http://openedconference.org/2010.
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Consortium News and Updates Upcoming Webinars The schedule for the OCW Consortium upcoming monthly webinar series is as follows: “Automated Video Transcription” by Mitja Jermol from Videolectures.net. July 1, 10AM EDT (UTC/GMT -4 hours) “Using Creative Commons for Educational Content” by Lila Bailey from Creative Commons. August 5, 10AM EDT “Roundtable Discussion: Developing Open License Guidelines for OCW Content” September 2, 10AM EDT Webinars are held on the first Thursday of each month. There is no need to register. You can join at http://breezemeeting.asu.edu/ocwc. A headset is recommended if you would like to participate in the discussion. Welcoming New Members We welcome new members to the
community. Institutions that have joined since April are: ● Thomas Edison Program for Environment and E-Learning Development — http:// www.thomasedisonprogram.org ● New Jersey Institute of Technology http://ocw.njit.edu ● Manor Labs — http://www.manorlabs.org. ● AcrossWorld — http://www.acrossworld.com. Welcome and Thank you to Incoming and Outgoing Board Members New board members were elected at the OCW Consortium Global meeting last May. Re-elected are Steve Carson from MIT, Yoshimi Fukuhara from Keio University, and Philipp Schmidt from the University of the Western Cape. Newly elected are Youngsup Kim from Handong Global University for Institutional Representative, and Joel Thierstein from Connexions, and Ignasi Labastida from Creative Commons
for Affiliate Representative. Andy Lane from Open University UK and Fun-den Wang from CORE each have served a two-year term as founding members of the Board. Catharina Maracke of Creative Commons and Doris Rojas of the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria also finished their terms this year. We would like to extend a warm welcome and our heartfelt appreciation to both incoming and outgoing board members. Current board members are: Steve Carson, MIT Larry Cooperman, University of California, Irvine Jose Escamilla de los Santos, Tecnológico de Monterrey Yoshimi Fukuhara, Keio University Youngsup Kim, Handong Global University Ignasi Labastida I Juan, Creative Commons Anka Mulder, TU Delft Philipp Schmidt, University of the Western Cape Joel Thierstein, Connexions Edmundo Tovar, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid
OpenCourseWare Consortium One Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02142 USA www.ocwconsortium.org feedback@ocwconsortium.org 1-617-418-4546 Email newsletter@ocwconsortium.org and let us know what‟s new with you!
8 OpenCourseWare Consortium June 2010