Help Us Build Creative Commons Certificates – Open Community Call

Paul Stacey, April 5th, 2016

With Creative Commons now being used by people all over the world to openly license over a billion pieces of content, a good working knowledge of what Creative Commons is and how it works is critical.

Creative Commons is developing a series of certificates to provide organizations and individuals with a range of options for increasing knowledge and use of Creative Commons.

The Creative Commons Master Certificate will define the full body of knowledge and skills needed to master CC. This master certificate will be of interest to those who need a broad and deep understanding of all things Creative Commons.

In addition, custom certificates are being designed for specific types of individuals and organizations. Initially Creative Commons is focusing on creating a specific CC Certificate for 1. educators, 2. government, and 3. librarians. The CC Certificate for each of these will include a subset of learning outcomes from the overall CC Master Certificate along with new learning outcomes specific to each role.

All certificates will include both a modular set of learning materials that can be used independently for informal learning, and a formal, structured and facilitated certificate the can be taken for official certification.

CC is grateful for initial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services who have provided funding for the development of the CC Master Certificate and specialized versions for educators, government, and librarians.

Creative Commons is seeking to engage the entire open community in the development of these certificates.

Sandcastles by Neil Turner CC BY-SA 

We plan to design and develop the certificates openly on the web in a way that allows for public input and contribution. We currently are experimenting with making all the certificate designs available for review and edit through GitHub and other tools.

In addition we are looking to tap into as much subject matter expertise as possible through the formation of  certificate working groups. A working group of Creative Commons staff has been formed to provide subject matter expertise on the CC Master Certificate. We’re also reaching out through our networks to form working groups with librarians, educators and government to ensure the specialized certificates are relevant and appropriately targeted to each group.

A Creative Commons Certificate librarian working group is being formed through coordinated outreach in consultation with organizations like the American Library Association, Digital Public Library of America, and SPARC.

The government and educator versions of the certificate are being created to satisfy needs that emerged out of the US Department of Labor Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) grant and the 700+ community colleges who are grantees. Creative Commons is reaching out to these and others for expertise on the government and educator versions of the certificate.

A working group of participants from across Creative Commons global affiliate network has also been formed to help ensure initial work takes into consideration internationalization and localization.

If you’d like to be actively involved in any of these working groups let us know.

Certificates will be created as Creative Commons licensed Open Educational Resources reusing and remixing as many existing openly licensed resources as possible. We’re looking to aggregate, adopt, and adapt existing materials as much as possible and only develop new content for areas where nothing already exists. We’ll be inviting you to identify all materials you’re aware of and map them to certificate learning outcomes.

Rather than focusing our initial efforts on content development we’ll instead focus on defining learning outcomes along with associated activities and assessments that effectively test those outcomes. Our aim is to have assessments be 100% performance-based, testing people on their ability to use Creative Commons in applied and practical ways. One form of activity and assessment will include having certificate participants create actual certificate content as OER. Co-creation with participants will build up a pool of community created Creative Commons Certificate content, targeted to learning outcomes, in many different languages, localized to different parts of the world, and curated by Creative Commons.

If you have thoughts, resources, or interest in helping out please let us know.

We currently have a submission in to the Knight Foundation’s “How might libraries serve 21st century information needs?” challenge brief. If successful, we plan to engage working groups of librarians in multi-day sprint workshops to do everything from co-defining learning outcomes, to identifying existing CC related openly licensed curricula, beta testing curricula, and defining optimal modes of delivery and duration. If you think that is a good idea or want to be part of those sprints we invite you to express interest by sharing your comments here Creative Commons (CC) Certificate for Librarians.

In future development, Creative Commons is planning for a train-the-trainer certification which will authorize others to deliver Creative Commons certificates on its behalf in different parts of the world. We welcome expressions of interest from other organizations wanting to work with us on this.

As CC embarks on its strategy to “foster a vibrant, usable, and collaborative global commons”, Creative Commons certificates will play a critical role in ensuring participation scales in informed and skilled ways.

Public Access to Publicly Funded Materials: What Could Be

billy.meinke, September 25th, 2013

This blog post was written by Teresa Sempere García, CC’s Community Support Intern June-August, 2013. The cycle graphics below were designed by Timothy Vollmer and Teresa Sempere García.

The current system for public access to research articles and educational materials is broken: ownership is often unclear, and the reuse of knowledge is limited by policies that do not maximize the impact of public funding. The following graphics will try to simplify and compare two alternative funding cycles for research publications and educational resources that emphasize the positive impacts of open policies on publicly-funded grants. More information and links to a current directory of current and proposed OER open policies can be found in the OER Policy Registry on the Creative Commons Wiki.

Cycles for Research Articles

The existing system for producing and distributing publicly funded research articles is expensive and doesn’t take advantage of the possibilities of innovations like open licensing. Without a free-flowing system, access to the results of scientific research is limited to institutions that are able to commit to hefty journal subscriptions — paid for year after year — which don’t allow for broad redistribution, or repurposing for activities such as text and data mining without additional permissions from the rightsholder. This closed system limits the impact on the scientific and scholarly community and progress is slowed significantly.

A Closed Research Model

When funding cycles for research include open license requirements for publications, increased access and opportunities for reuse extends the value of research funding. As an example, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requires the published results of all NIH-funded research to be deposited in PubMed Central’s repository, the peer-reviewed manuscript immediately, and the final journal article within twelve months of publication. Similarly, the recent directive issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy mandates that federal agencies with more than $100 million in research expenditures must make the results of their research publicly available within one year of publication, and better manage the resultant data supporting their results. These policies utilize aspects of the optimized cycle below, and are a step in the right direction for making better use of public funding for research articles.

An Open Research Model

Cycles for Educational Resources

The incumbent system for developing and sharing publicly funded educational resources doesn’t guarantee materials are accessible and reusable by the public that paid for their creation.

A Closed Education Model

If policies are put in place that mandate open licenses on publicly funded educational resources, knowledge can flow more freely because the public is clear about how they may reuse educational content, and the funders can realize a more impactful return on their investments. An example of better use of public funding for the production of educational resources, the US DOL TAACCCT Program mandates that all content created or modified using grant funds are openly-licensed (CC BY) and deposited in a public repository upon completion of the project. Being conducted in four waves, the TAACCCT program is making better use of a large (US$2 billion) investment of US taxpayer money by ensuring the public will have access the educational resources created during the four-year term, and is able to reuse and adapt them beyond what automatic copyright allows. The following graphic demonstrates an open funding model, with licensing and access recommendations to remove barriers to sharing and help speed access and reuse of publicly funded educational content.

An Open Education Model

Summary

Open policy — specifically, the idea that publicly funded materials should be openly licensed materials — is a sensible solution that ensures the public’s right to reuse the materials it paid for, and improves the efficiency of government grant funding. Open licensing is a sensible requirement for publicly funded grant programs.

OPEN Partners Host U.S. Department of Labor TAACCCT Grantee Kick-Off Conference

billy.meinke, June 27th, 2013

Giulia Forsyth / CC BY

Wave 2 Kick-off Event, Minneapolis MN

Round 2 Grantees from the US Department of Labor’s (DOL) Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College & Career Training (TAACCCT) program were invited to attend last week’s Kick-off Conference, hosted by OPEN Partners: CC, CMU’s OLI, CAST, and SBCTC. This was a unique opportunity for the Gates-funded OPEN Partners to explain services made available to grantees at no cost, supporting the building of Open Educational Resources (OER) that meet current standards of accessibility, pedagogically-sound and technology-supported design, as well as legal openness. Creative Commons is leading the OPEN Partner services and support, lending expertise in legal and technical aspects of open education to the project. Representatives from forty seven Round 2 TAACCCT projects attended workshops to understand service basics, and a showcase to hear from select Round 1 Grantee projects that made use of the complementary services offered to all grantees.

Photo by Cable Green / CC BY

Highlighted Round 1 Grantees included The National Stem Consortium (NSC), the Colorado Online Energy Training Consortium (COETC), and the Missouri Online HealthWINs program, sharing their experiences in the program thus far. All grantees are funded to support the building of community college-level and technical training courses that will provide opportunities for unemployed and under-employed adults to gain certificates and degrees in high-skilled industries. The OPEN partners offer expertise to grantees around accessibility frameworks, open-licensing and technical interoperability, and quality standards for online education. All of the courses and learning materials created in this four year $2 billion DOL grant program are being licensed for reuse with a Creative Commons (CC BY) license, making this the largest OER production effort to date. The pool of courseware will include lessons, videos, images, and interactive content for learners in health care, information technology (IT), advanced manufacturing, and other industries that need high-skilled workforce support. It’s a big deal.

Keynote and Plenary Sessions

CC’s Director of Global Learning, Cable Green, provided the opening keynote for the conference titled Online Technology, Open Licenses, and Open Educational Resources – The Opportunity for DOL TAACCCT Grantees. The Center for Accessibility Supportive Technology’s (CAST) Samantha Johnston provided an overview of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, and spoke about accessibility in distance education, which most TAACCCT courses are being developed for. Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) Boyoung Chae offered a session about creating and managing OER, targeted at new grantees that will likely be collaborating on content in the coming year. CC, CAST, and the Washington State Board of Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) offered multiple hands-on sessions to familiarize grantees with DOL-mandated aspects of their course design, and describe how the OPEN Partners are offering continue support. CC’s Jane Park led sessions on the CC-BY license and best practices for applying CC licenses to work.

As a special service to grantees, Giulia Forsythe joined the OPEN Partners to provide visual recording (see image above) for the major talks. The creation of visual notes offered another way for participants to understand the big ideas of the speakers’ messages, using sketch-based keywords and symbols to describe connections. During a lightning around for new grantees, participants from over forty of the funded college and consortia spoke briefly about their projects and plans. Visual representations of these descriptions will soon be posted to the OPEN4us.org site.

Photo by Cable Green / CC BY

OPEN Supporting TAACCCT Grantees

Creative Commons and the OPEN Partners will continue to support TAACCCT Grantees in the upcoming months, maximizing the value and reusability of this amazing pool of OER. Handouts, visuals, webinar recordings, and additional grantee information can be found on the OPEN Partner website, Open4Us.org.

Report Released by U.S. GAO Demonstrates the Need for Open Textbooks

billy.meinke, June 14th, 2013

Books /John Liu / CC BY

A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6th confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress, looks at the efforts of publishers and colleges to increase the availability of textbook price information and “unbundled” buying options as required under provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The GAO also interviewed faculty regarding benefits of this transparency and offering of new options for students purchasing course materials.

What they found

Findings of the study indicated that faculty are more aware of textbook affordability issues than they used to be, though they see the appropriateness of materials as the most important factor when it comes to choosing resources to use in a course. HEOA requires publishers to include information about textbook prices when marketing to faculty, including wholesale prices and copyright dates of previous versions. While the report finds that publishers have passively made this information available through their websites and other materials, the GAO did not investigate whether publishers are actively providing the information to faculty as required by law. Making this information not only available, but highly visible, is the best way to support and equip faculty to consider textbook costs and potentially explore more affordable and flexible textbook options.

The study also finds that textbook price transparency helped students save money, particularly because of the information colleges and universities posted in course catalogs. Of the 150 institutions the GAO reviewed, 81 percent provided textbook information online during the months leading up to the fall 2012 semester. This allowed students the opportunity to consider the costs associated with each course and the time to seek cost-cutting alternatives like used books and renting. But even with this relief, textbook prices continue to reach into the $200-and-more range for high-enrollment courses. The end goal of the HEOA price transparency provisions is to pressure publishers into lowering their prices for good.

What this means

As Nicole Allen, Affordable Textbooks Advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups (Student PIRGs) explained, “Overall, the report shows that the HEOA requirements have helped students and professors become more aware of textbook costs, and this awareness builds market pressure that will eventually lead to fairer prices and more affordable alternatives. Although right now publishers stubbornly continue driving prices skyward, they can only ignore the call for affordability for so long.”

The report mentions other textbook affordability efforts that colleges and universities explored alongside providing textbook price information. About two-thirds of the schools that the GAO interviewed offered an institutional rental program, and many offered price information for alternate formats, such as e-textbooks. For example, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges’ Open Course Library, which offers Open Educational Resources (OER) and other low cost materials for the system’s 81 largest courses, has saved students $5.5 million to date — about three times as much as the program cost. As the shift of resources towards efforts that provide more options to students and faculty is seen across the US and in other areas around the world, we anticipate more participation in communities around OER. Which is a great thing.

Next steps towards affordable textbooks

The HEOA requirements for textbook price transparency were a good first step, but there’s more work to do to solve rising textbook costs and lack of flexibility in choosing learning materials for courses. OER, like those created, revised, and shared in the Open Course Library have the potential to significantly offset these costs while at the same time providing more options for faculty and students to customize textbooks and other courseware to their needs. CC believes that OER is the next step in providing affordable, flexible, and truly open educational opportunities for students and faculty, allowing global citizens to better choose their own learning pathways.

opensourceway / CC BY-SA

A joint statement issued by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on June 7th affirms the potential for OER as a solution: “As the GAO report suggests, transparency alone isn’t enough. Students need more access to high-quality, affordable options that challenge the current price structure set by a handful of publishers. Open Educational Resources, which include high-quality open textbooks that are free for faculty to adopt and students to use, offer a promising step forward. With many recent technology advancements it will be important for Congress to continue to learn more about the textbook sector to ensure that there are accountability mechanisms in place to protect students and taxpayers.”

The Student PIRGs announcement about the study is here
The full report of the GAO’s study can be found here
And lastly, a podcast with a member of GAO’s staff that led this study is here

Third Round of TAACCCT Grants Announced by US Department of Labor

pstacey, April 25th, 2013

On April 19, 2013 US Acting Secretary of Labor Seth D. Harris announced the third annual round of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Program (TAACCCT) grant program. The press release states that the current round of grants available is $474.5 million bringing the total 2011-13 program investment to nearly $1.5 billion. A fourth round is planned for 2014. Information on all the rounds is available here.

Funding is targeted at expanding innovative partnerships between community colleges and employers. All education and career training program strategies developed through grant funds have employer engagement and use labor market information to focus training on local economic needs. This years Solicitation for Grant Applications (SGA) says the TAACCCT programs aim is to help “adults acquire the skills, degrees, and credentials needed for high-wage, high-skill employment while ensuring needs of employers for skilled workers are met”.

In addition to partnerships TAACCCT stimulates innovation by requiring applicants to build five core elements into their initiatives:
1. Evidence-Based Design
2. Stacked and Latticed Credentials
3. Transferability and Articulation of Credit
4. Advanced Online and Technology Enabled Learning
5. Strategic Alignment

This years SGA even encourages the use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

Another innovation, which DOL has maintained in all three rounds of the TAACCCT program, is the requirement for TAACCCT grantees to make all grant funded curricula and training materials Open Educational Resources (OER) by licensing them with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY).

This year’s SGA states:

• “The purpose of the CC BY licensing requirement is to ensure that materials developed with funds provided by these grants result in Work that can be freely reused and improved by others.”
• “To ensure that the Federal investment of these funds has as broad an impact as possible and to encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials, as a condition of the receipt of a TAACCCT grant, the grantee will be required to license to the public all work (except for computer software source code, discussed below) created with the support of the grant under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CCBY) license. Work that must be licensed under the CCBY includes both new content created with the grant funds and modifications made to pre-existing, grantee-owned content using grant funds.”
• “This license allows subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the copyrighted Work and requires such users to attribute the Work in the manner specified by the grantee. Notice of the license shall be affixed to the Work. For general information on CCBY, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0“

TAACCCT academic resources developed by the first round of grantees for industry sectors such as health, manufacturing, energy, transportation, and information technology, will become available for reuse in 2014 followed by additional resources from subsequent rounds. What a boon to education and the economy.

Congratulations to the Department of Labor and the Department of Education for their leadership and foresight in requiring publicly funded educational resources be openly licensed in a way that allows them to be reused and continuously improved. This innovation will benefit students, educators, and industry.

Creative Commons remains committed to supporting TAACCCT grantees in deploying and leveraging the CC BY requirement. See OPEN4us.org for a current list of TAACCCT grantee services Creative Commons offers in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative, Center for Applied Special Technology, and the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges.

Open Textbook Summit

pstacey, April 12th, 2013

On April 8 & 9, 2013 BCcampus hosted, and Creative Commons facilitated, an Open Textbook Summit in Vancouver British Columbia Canada. The Open Textbook Summit brought together government representatives, student groups, and open textbook developers in an effort to coordinate and leverage open textbook initiatives.

Participants included:

BCcampus
BC Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology (AEIT)
Creative Commons
eCampus Alberta
Alberta Enterprise & Advanced Education
The 20 Million Minds Foundation
Washington Open Course Library
University of Minnesota Open Textbook Catalogue
Lumen Learning
Siyavula
Open Courseware Consortium
OpenStax/Connexions
Student Public Interest Research Groups
Right to Research Coalition
Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA)

California and British Columbia recently announced initiatives to create open textbooks for high enrollment courses. Susan Brown in her welcoming remarks on behalf of the Deputy Minister of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology noted the Open Textbook Summit was “a unique opportunity to share information about the work underway in our respective jurisdictions and organizations to capitalize on lessons learned; to identify common areas of interest; and to discover potential opportunities for collaboration. The real power of a project like this is only realized by working together.”

On the summit’s first day the BC government announced it was “Moving to the next chapter on free online textbooks” releasing a list of the 40 most highly enrolled first and second-year subject areas in the provincial post-secondary system.

Over the course of the summit participants identified existing open textbooks that could be used for BC’s high enrollment courses. Development plans for creating additional open textbooks were mapped out. Strategies for academic use of open textbooks were discussed ranging from open textbooks for high enrollment courses to zero textbook degree programs where every course in a credential has an open textbook.

Open textbook developers described the tools they are using for authoring, editing, remixing, repository storage, access, and distribution. Participants discussed the potential for creating synergy between initiatives through use of common tools and processes.

Measures of success, including saving students money and improved learning outcomes, were shared and potential for a joint open textbook research agenda explored. The summit concluded with suggestions from all participants on ways to collaborate going forward. David Porters recommendation of an ongoing Open Textbook Federation was enthusiastically endorsed.

Mary Burgess created a Google group called The Open Textbook Federation for further conversations and collaborations. This group is open to anyone currently working on, or thinking of working on, an Open Textbook Project. Notes from the Open Textbook Summit are posted online. Clint Lalonde created a Storify of the Twitter conversation captured during the summit.

The Open Textbook Summit was an incredible day and a half of learning. The sharing of insights, experiences, hopes, and ideas left everyone energized with a commitment to join together in a cross-border federation that collaborates on open textbooks.

CC Talks With: David Liao: Open Courseware and CC Licenses

billy.meinke, April 10th, 2013

Last week a researcher and educator by the name of David Liao contacted our team at Creative Commons about open courseware he had created, which we tweeted:

“A mathematical way to think about biology.” Really well put-together CC BY-SA course. qbio.lookatphysics.com @lookatphysics #oer

— creativecommons (@creativecommons) March 25, 2013

I sat down last Wednesday to speak with David about his course, motivations for using a CC-license, and about other challenges in scholarly communication and education that are being changed by new ways of “open.” He’s created a set of videos and curriculum titled A Mathematical Way to Think about Biology, released under a CC BY-SA license. David, an Analyst with the University of California, SF and a member of the Princeton Physical Sciences-Oncology Network, recognized that quantitative research is fundamental to hard science disciplines, but there are few openly licensed training resources on these methods that can translate to Biology as well as other non-scientific fields.

Screenshot from David’s Udemy course

Already a proponent of Open Access (OA) to research publications, David sums up his view on how principles of OA can be applied to education:

”Speaking loosely along the same lines of sentiment [of Open Access], it is likewise preferable to release, as free cultural works, both scientific literature and the instructional materials by virtue of which that literature becomes readable.”

As David explained, there is a gap between the highly-technical aspects of training future researchers and the practical resources available; one that he hopes to begin to fill by making his materials available online. He has developed more than ten learning modules ranging from fundamental mathematical concepts of algebra and geometry to more complex areas of spatially-resolved models and cellular automata, all described in ways that apply to the biological sciences. The slide decks and tutorial videos have all been released under a CC BY-SA license, which allows reuse and remixing the content, so long as any adapted content carries the same copyleft license. David’s content has been structured as a course, is available on the Udemy online learning platform and has had nearly one thousand participants use the material.

An advocate of many things Open for some time, our conversation shifted from OER to OA. David offered his take on Open Access and how scholarly communication has reached a point where tools like CC licenses are needed to maintain progress in a digital age.

“Ten years ago, when it came to negotiating legal matters around copyright and intellectual property, we would need to be able to do some serious Jiu-Jitsu, and likely involve a team of lawyers. Creative Commons [licenses] makes this communication so much easier.”

Fort Worth MMA and BJJ_5896 / ironsidemma / CC BY 2.0

By making his content available on the web and applying a CC license to his work, David has taken steps to not only make his educational media openly accessible, but also explicitly describe how others can reuse his work. A longstanding problem in defining the core characteristics of “open”, digital media that is freely accessible but does not allow for reuse or remixing is often confused with open content. David has been pleased to see learners using the materials in his course, as well as having had fellow college professors contact him about using his content to supplement their own teaching. When asked about his thoughts on others who likely will be remixing and building upon his learning content, David welcomed it fully, and is interested to have others to contact with links to derivative works.

A case study on the CC Wiki for A Mathematical Approach to Biology can be found here.

David’s course can be found on Udemy here, and his personal website is here.
You can also follow David on Twitter here.

Open Education Around the World – A 2013 Open Education Week Summary

pstacey, April 5th, 2013

Creative Commons congratulates all those who participated in the second annual Open Education Week March 11-15, 2013. It’s impressive to see how global open education has become with contributors from over 30 different countries showcasing their work and more than 20,000 people from over 130 countries visiting the Open Education Week website during the week. Open Education Week featured over 60 webinars open to participation from anyone and numerous local events and workshops around the world.

We thought we’d highlight a few Creative Commons global affiliate events from Open Education Week and share a list of urls for Open Education Week webinar recordings the Open Courseware Consortium has published.

The Creative Commons China Mainland team successfully held an Open Education Forum on the afternoon of March 16th at Renmin University of China, Beijing. One highlight of this salon worth special attention is the Toyhouse team from Tsinghua University led by Prof. Benjamin Koo, and their recent project eXtreme Learning Process (XLP). This team is a inspiring example of innovative learning, and a user of CC licenses and OER.

Tobias Schonwetter, Creative Commons regional coordinator for Africa gave an Open Education for Africa presentation explaining why Creative Commons is so important for Open Educational Resources.

The School of Open launched with:

• 17 courses, including 4 facilitated courses and 13 stand-alone courses (for participants to take at their own pace).
• ~15 course organizers, affiliated with several organizations/initiatives, including: the National Copyright Office of Australia; University of Michigan’s Open.Michigan; Kennisland/CC Netherlands; Communicate OER, a Wikipedia initiative; Open Video Forum (xm:lab, Academy of Fine Arts Saar); Jamlab (a high school mentorship program in Kenya); Wikimedia Germany and CC Germany

These are just the tip of the rich global discourse that took place during Open Education Week. All webinars during Open Education Week were recorded, with links listed below. You can also view the videos directly on the Open Education Week YouTube channel and on the Open Education Week website, under events and webinars.

Webinar recordings

Monday, March 11

·       Building Research Profile and Culture with Open Access 
·       Learners orchestrating their own learning
·       Learning Innovations and Learning Quality: The future of open education and
        free digital resources
·       Näin käytät ja teet avoimia sisältöjä /How to use and create open content
·       New global open educational trends: policy, learning design and mobile
·       The multiple facets of Openness in #udsnf12  
·       Licencias Creative Commons para recursos educativos, ¿que son? ¿como usarlas?
·       Designing OER with Diversity In Mind
·       وسائل تعليمية تشاركية : تطوير الوسائل التعليمية تشاركيًا باستخدام أداة الابتكار ومنصة  سكراتش البرمجية
·       Driving Adoptions of OER Through Communities of Practice
·       Khan Academy: Personalized learning experiences
·       Good practices on open content licensing
 
Tuesday, March 12
 
·       OCW in the European Higher Education Context: How to make use of its full
        potential for virtual mobility
·       OLDS MOOC Grand finale (final convergence session)  
·       Äidinkielestä riippumaton suomen kielen opetus
·       Opening Up Education
·       CourseSites by Blackboard: A Free, Hosted, Scalable Platform for Open
        Education Initiatives
·       Xpert Search Engine and the Xpert Image Attribution Service
·       Capacitación para la educación abierta: OportUnidad en Latinoamérica
·       Language learning independent of mother language
·       Interactive Learning with Wolfram Technologies
·       Collaborative Boldly Confronts Licensing Issues
·       Buenas prácticas en el uso de licencias para contenidos abiertos
 
Wednesday, March 13

·       是“誰”在使用你的開放式課程網站呢?
·       The interaction, co-construction and sharing of Netease Open Courses
        网易公开课的互动、共建和分享
·       Who is using your OCW site?
·       Políticas nacionales de Acceso Abierto en Argentina
·       Open Policy Network: seeking community input
·       OER Commons Green: A Unique Lens on Open Environmental Education
·       Creative Commons 4.0 Licenses: What's New for Education?
·       How Community Colleges are Innovating with Open Educational Resources
·       P2PU: A Showcase of Open Peer Learning
 
Thursday, March 14

·       Open Access policy development at the University of Pretoria: the why, what
        and how?
·       What you can learn from the UKOER experience
·       Why Open Access is Right for the World Bank
·       What's behind Open Education? A philosophical insight
·       Utilizing OER to Create a Pathway Towards an Affordable Degree  
·       Toolkit Working Group: Tools to help users discover the content they need (1)
·       Learning toys for free: Collaborative educational tools development using
        MakeyMakey and SCRATCH platforms
·       Teach Syria: The Impact of Teaching Global to Today's Youth
·       Re-Creative Commons
·       Validating the Learning Obtained through Open Educational Resources
·       OER and Alternative Certification Models: An Analysis Framework
·       The Open Educational Resources in Brazil as an Instrument to Get Access to
        Qualification, The Government Role at OERs Creation & FGV and
        São Paulo State Case Studies
 
Friday, March 15

·       Open Education for Africa
·       National policies of Open Access to scientific outputs in Argentina
·       Re-thinking Developmental Education: Creating a STEM Bridge in the National
        STEM Consortium
·       Toolkit Working Group: Tools to aid and encourage use of OERs in teaching
·       Crowd-sourced Open Courseware Authoring with SlideWiki.org
·       Using OER to reduce student cost and increase student learning
·       What's next? An open discussion about open education
·       OpenStax College Textbooks: Remixable by Design
·       An OER Editor for the Rest of Us
 

Kudos to the OCW Consortium for organizing this event. We look forward to next years.

OERu: Distinctively Open

pstacey, February 26th, 2013

While mainstream attention has been focused on MOOCs, the Open Educational Resource university (OERu) has been developing a parallel education offering which is distinctively open.

The OERu aims to provide free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials with pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognized education institutions.

Like MOOCs, the OERu will have free open enrollment. But OERu’s open practices go well beyond open enrollment.

The OERu uses an open peer review model inviting open public input and feedback on courses and programs as they are being designed. At the beginning of 2013, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority approved a new Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Education to be developed as OER and offered as part of OERu offerings. OERu recently published the design blueprint and requested public input and feedback for the Open Education Practice elective, one of a number of blueprints for OERu courses.

OERu course materials are licensed using Creative Commons licenses (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) and based solely on OER (including open textbooks). In addition, OERu course materials are designed and developed using open file formats (easy to revise, remix, and redistribute) and delivered using open-source software.

The OERu network offers assessment and credentialing services through its partner educational institutions on a cost-recovery basis. Through the community service mission of OERu participating institutions, OER learners have open pathways to earn formal academic credit and pay reduced fees for assessment and credit.

Open peer review, open public input, open educational resources, open textbooks, open file formats, open source software, open enrollments – the OERu is distinctively open.

Congratulations to the OERu on its second anniversary and its upcoming international launch in November.

Open Science Course Sprint: An Education Hackathon for Open Data Day

billy.meinke, February 11th, 2013

Logo by Greg Emmerich / CC-BY-SA

An Education Sprint

The future of Open is a dynamic landscape, ripe with opportunities to increase civic engagement, literacy, and innovation. Towards this goal, the Science Program at Creative Commons is teaming up with the Open Knowledge Foundation and members of the Open Science Community to facilitate the building of an open online course, an Introduction to Open Science. The actual build will take place during a hackathon-style “sprint” event on Open Data Day on Saturday, February 23rd and will serve as a launch course for the School of Open during Open Education Week (Mar 11-15).

Want to help us build this?

The course will be open in it’s entirety, the building process and content all available to be worked on, all to help people learn about Open Science. Do you know a thing or two about Open Access? Are you a researcher who’s practicing Open Research? Do you have experience in instructional or visual design? This is an all-hands event and will be facilitated by representatives at CC, OKFN, and others in the Community. Open Science enthusiasts in the Bay Area are invited to the CC Headquarters in Mountain View for the live event. Remote participants will also be able to join and contribute online via Google Hangout.

The day will begin with coffee, refreshments and a check-in call with other Open Data Day Hackathons happening around the globe. The Open Science Community is strengthened by shared interests and connections between people, which we hope will grow stronger through networked events on Open Data Day. The Open Science course sprint at CC HQ will build upon open educational content, facilitate the design of challenges for exploration, and provide easy entry for learners into concepts of Open Access, Open Research, and Open Data. It will be done in a similar fashion to other “sprint-style” content-creation events, with lunch and refreshments provided for in-person participants. We’re literally going to be hacking on education. Sound like something you’d be interested in?

Join us.

For details about the ways you can participate, see the Eventbrite page here.
To see the draft (lightly framed) course site on Peer to Peer University, go here.
For information about other Open Data Day events, see the events wiki here.

Opendataday.org/map

Developers

We need you, too! Basic skills for working with open datasets is important, and can be difficult to grasp. Who better to develop great lessons about working with data than you? Similarly, for those interested in building upon apps and projects from other Open Data Events, updated source code and repository information will be posted to a public feed (for now, follow hashtags #ODHD13 and #opendataday on Twitter).

For other information, contact billy dot meinke at creative commons dot org or @billymeinke.

This event is being organized by the Science Program at Creative Commons with support from the Open Knowledge Foundation, PLOS, and members of the Open Science Community.