Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein

This week I ventured to explore a number of OER projects and conduct a preliminary assessment of the reusability and remixability of the OER hosted in each. Based on earlier (albeit shallow) familiarity with some of these OER initiatives I am able to presume that the structure and technology of a selected sample OER from each is generally representative of all or most OER in the given project (more…)

I’m certainly not the first to suggest that sustainability is an elephantine problem for current and future OER projects. But it’s a problem that may take several perspectives and ideas in order to condense workable solutions (more…)

In David Wiley’s Intro to Open Education course students were asked to randomly choose and then examine 5 MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) courses, and 5 Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI) courses. I’ve done random examinations of OCW/OER in the past, so I changed this up a bit to fit my own inclinations: first, I made my choices semi-randomly (more…)

For reference here’s a quick run-down of Creative Commons (CC) v. 3 licenses with comments on their usefulness for open education. As most of you probably already know, CC provides a means by which creators can license their works differently from pre-existing intellectual property licenses. In the USA the two options have been copyright or public domain. CC provides for lots of options in between (more…)

I’ve suggested that “open education” should not be seen as synonymous with various related efforts. Just as there are only approximations at a manifesto for the open education movement, there is no single definition of what efforts constitute or contribute to open education, and open education can not be fairly defined by more granular efforts for the production of open educational resources, opencourseware, etc. That is as much due to conflicting definitions of “open” as it is to organizational motivations (more…)

When I think of open education I tend to think of it at a granular level, in terms of open educational resources (OER), opencourseware (OCW), or even the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). At these more limited levels engaging in open education makes a lot of sense to me, and offers very attainable, short-term goals which serve bot the “target audience” (whoever that is) and my institution. But OER, OCW and open education are not synonymous. Open education, though often referred to as a “movement” is a broader philosophy, one which prescribes aspects of the creation, release, and access to education (more…)