Talk at IIPA in Delhi on open research, OER and open learning in developing countries (slidecast)
I was lucky enough to be invited to give a talk at Indian Institute of Public Administration in New Delhi, a research institute that does consulting jobs for the Indian government and also training of senior civil servants. I spoke to a group of perhaps 25 librarians and professors, trying to give a “whirlwind” tour of the field of open research and open learning, both in general but also in terms of its usefulness for developing countries. It seemed to be well received, and I had several requests afterward for more information. I recorded the lecture on Audacity on my MacBook (quality is mostly good, except for a few times when I turn away from my laptop), and synched it with the slides on SlideShare (synch is mostly good except when the slides change too fast, and SlideShare can’t keep up).
Feel free to have a look and let me know what you think. Below I have also included all the links from the presentation, mainly for the benefit of those who attended.
Thanks again to IIPA and Dr. Munshi for inviting me.
Correction: Hindawi is based in Egypt, not in India. Apologies for this. However, there is still a lot of open access journals being published in India.
Update: Here is a direct link to the MP3 recording (if you press play below, it will play the sound and sync the slides, but if you have a slow connection, or want to listen offline).
Links:
- OpenLibrary
- Universal Library
- E-LIS (repository of library and information science papers)
- PlOS Biology (high-profile open access journal in biology)
- Hindawi (Indian publisher with over 100 open access journals, and interesting business model)
- UsefulChem (example of Open Notebook Science - lab notebook from a chemistry lab)
- DomainEvolution (another example of Open Notebook Science - this one experimenting with hosting it at Google Code)
- iLabs (MIT project to enable remote controlling of labs, to give access to laboratory for students in other countries)
- Newspaper article about iLabs (African students get access to MIT labs - could also be expanded to researchers - demonstrates overlap between university education and research)
- MIT OpenCourseWare (the pioneer in the OCW field, 1800 courses available)
- MIT Introduction to Numerical Simulation (example of an OCW course page)
- Universia (translates MIT OCW material into Spanish)
- CORE (China Open Resources for Education - manages translation of MIT OCW courses into Chinese)
- OpenLearn (Open University UK’s OCW section)
- Connexions (enables peer2peer construction of course material, and quality control happens through “lenses”)
- Open Learning Initiative (CMU courses that are interactive and provide feedback to students)
- Intro to Open Ed (the first “Wiley wiki” course, which I also participated in)
- Week 1 (my first submission in the Intro to Open Ed course)
- A number of courses based on the “Wiley wiki” model introduced by Intro to Open Ed:
Facilitating online communities
Evaluation of e-learning for best practices
Designing for flexible learning practice
Connectivism and Connective Knowledge
Translation of Connectivism course into Portuguese
Translation of Connectivism course into Spanish - IIT Courses on Youtube
- List of Chinese OCW courses at CORE
- Confucianism in France in the 18th Century (Example of Chinese OCW that should be subtitled in French)
- China Geography (Chinese OCW that has been translated to English)

