Innovative projects in the publishing of OER
November 19, 2009, [MD]
In October, University of Toronto participated in the world-wide Open Access Week with a number of different events. I got the honor of starting off with the first event (although I believe there was one event the week before), with a presentation about Innovative projects in the publishing of OER. I've always been interested in how different institutions and countries around the world approach the production of OER, and have given presentations in the past about the incredible wealth and diversity and projects out there. In these presentations (linked from my presentations page), I usually discuss the projects from a resource perspective - what is out there, and how can we use it. This time, I decided to focus more on why these different projects were set up, what their purpose is, who runs them, and how they are sustained financially.
I started with MIT, talked about OpenCourseWare Consortium, and then the dScribes model at University of Michigan. I mentioned University of Oslo, that makes all their curricula available freely as a service to students, without ever thinking that it could be defined "OER". I talked about the biggest university in the world, Indira Gandhi National Open University, and their incredible resources in eGyanKosh and on Youtube.
Staying in India, I mentioned the Youtube collection of the IITs. Then I talked about Open University UK, China's Open Educational Resources, Wikiversity, Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative, Indian open textbooks and Indonesian open textbooks. I introduced a Norwegian project that is funding the production of high school educational materials in a very novel way, Free High School Science Texts in South Africa, Flat World Knowledge, Open High School of Utah, and finally I did a brief introduction of Peer2Peer University.
The entire presentation was recorded with Adobe Connect, and can be seen here, with both audio and slides synchronized. Since that doesn't work for everyone, I also put up an MP3 of the presentation, and put the slides on Slideshare.
A lot of this is new ground, and in some cases I don't know all the details behind these projects and the decisions they have made. If you have any examples of other interesting models for OER projects, or you want to correct anything I stated in the presentation, I'd love to hear from you.
Stian
Stian Håklev November 19, 2009 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus