Una Daly's Blog (27)

Ellen Marie Murphy, Director of Online Curriculum from SUNY Empire State College is doing some research regarding the credentialing possibilities that exist for individuals who wish to receive credit

for learning they achieve using OpenCourseWare.



For those who are not familiar with OpenCourseWare, here is a link tothe OpenCourseWare Consortium.

Ellen would like you to take just a minute or so to answer…

Tom Caswell, Program Manager for the Open Course Library, reported 10, 000 visitors to their site since its official launch of the first 42 courses on October 31, 2011.   He sums up the project which will contain 81 open courses targeted at the highest-enrolled general education classes for lower division…

It is with great pleasure that I announce the 8 winners of our Adopter Communities’ Small Grant program.   Each community proposed an outstanding project that uses open textbooks or open educational resources to improve teaching and learning for their students.    Disciplines ranged from the highly enrolled general education subjects of Chemistry, Physics, and Math to American Government and Developmental Reading & Composition.  Professional and career disciplines were also represented…

Thanks to Ruth Suehle, writer and editor in Brand Communications + Design at Red Hat for the notes.  I was busy finishing my slides for 11:30 presentation on College Open Textbooks' Adopter Communities during the keynote but I was listening :-)!…

"The 20 Million Minds Foundation (20MM Foundation) announced a new digitally enhanced etextbook for college students based on open content. The non-profit has set its sight on producing open source etextbooks for the top 25 courses taken by undergraduates in the nation, with general statistics being one of largest of such courses.

Starting today, Collaborative Statistics 2nd Edition is now available and provides students with an interactive experience using videos, applets, graphics,…

Athabasca University Press conducted research on how open access effects readership, print sales, and citations of articles and texts comparing their open access university press with three other traditional Canadian university presses.  No significant impact was shown on print sales for open access vs. copyrighted materials but significantly greater readership and citations of open access materials was found.

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Through the innovative partnership between Florida Distance Learning and the University of Florida Press, a growing number of open access textbooks are being created and reused in the classroom.  Last spring, the first in a series of three open calculus textbooks were tested in the classroom with 1600 students in Florida.  It is now available for anyone to download and the second and third textbooks will be available in spring 2012. 

In addition, American Government and…

Michael S. Hart invented the e-Book in 1971 when he typed in the text of the Declaration of Independence in a computer lab at the University of Illinois where he was a student.   For the next 40 years, Hart dedicated his life to the digitization and distribution of historical documents and literature in the process founding Project Gutenberg.   He passed away this last week at the age of 64.

Today Project Gutenberg, houses over 36,000 items in 60 languages.  The goal…

Creative Commons has published a new open book, "The Power of Open" with an introduction by Cathy Casserly, CEO and Joi Ito, Chair of Creative Commons.  It explains the history and derivation of all the creative common open licenses and shares dozens of inspiring stories about creative people sharing their work from education to music to art, etc ...

Visit http://thepowerofopen.org to download a digital version of The Power of Open or to find…

Dr. Ray Schroeder, Professor Emeritus of Communication and the founding director of the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois at Springfield describes the three major forces coming together to promote open online educational resources:

• RAPID PROLIFERATION OF RESOURCES
• WORLDWIDE PEOPLE ARE GOING ONLINE
• INTERNET HAS BECOME THE PREFERRED MEDIUM

Read this…

Thanks to Graham Atwell

Need some help figuring out which open license to use for publishing your new or revised open textbook.  Here is an online wizard to help you blend creative commons licenses from JISC and web2rights.

http://www.web2rights.com/OERIPRSupport/creativecommons/

California State University Report Warns About Google Apps Accessibility

Peter Mosinskis, information-technology project supervisor at California State University-Channel Islands, led the research, which looked specifically into Gmail Chat, Google Calendar, Google Sites, and Google Docs. Some 10 professional and student volunteers from California State University took part in the testing process, which began in January, and evaluated the range of apps for interface…

Hi, All – I recently posted a note the EDUCAUSE Washington Update (http://www.educause.edu/Policy/WashingtonUpdate) on the U.S. Department of Education’s Advisory Commission on Accessible Instructional Materials in…

Thanks to all who came to the webinar on Tuesday and participated in the announcement of this promising new partnership between the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources and the Open Courseware Consortium.

Slides and Elluminate archive are now posted for this past…

An insightful post from J Reynolds Community College in Virginia regarding OER and the way it breaks down barriers to learning ...

"In a recent post, English Professor Miles McCrimmon discussed the ways in which Open Educational Resources (OERs) are impacting the traditional approaches to and soaring costs of textbooks in education. Along those same lines, I've been thinking about…

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of giving a Discovering Open Textbooks workshop at the Los Angeles Trade Tech College with about 30-35 faculty and staff from LACCD.   Many faculty and staff were looking for affordable textbook solutions and were already seeking out open or free educational resources to incorporate into their classes.   Disciplines represented ranged from Art, English, Spanish, Labor, Chemistry, Oceanography, Business, Computer Applications, Career Planning, Music, Theater,…

Pat Lockley, OER Tool developer, from University of Nottingham has developed the amazing XPERT tool that allows you to search for OER subjects in the following formats: (pictures, sounds, videos).  When you select the desired item, it will created the open license and embed into the object.  Saves loads of times when you are looking for open images to include in instructional or other educational materials.

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