On February 15, 2012, the Faculty Council at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto formally (and I believe unanimously) passed an Open Access Policy. I believe this is the first faculty at the University of Toronto to pass an Open Access policy. The policy refers to both idealistic reasons, [...]

Two perspectives on Open Access promotion There are two different ways of promoting Open Access publishing to academic authors, and also two different perspectives from which to conduct research. The first is to say that the current system is wonderful, but many people are locked out – academics at smaller institutions, teachers and school administrations, [...]

I really intended to focus on my literature review these few weeks, and put Researchr hacking aside, but using it for many hours per day there are always little niggling things you want to fix. And sometimes I get ideas that I just “have to try out”. Researchr is built on DokuWiki, which has worked out [...]

This spring, I took a class called “Knowledge, Media and Learning”, where one of the assignments was to do research and create a design proposal. Together with Rebecca Cober and Lixa Lin, we decided to look at the research workflow for a junior researcher, such as a graduate student. Although we could think of many [...]

I completed my MA thesis on the Chinese National Top Level Courses Project in September 2010, and since then, I have been experimenting with publishing the results in a variety of different formats. I not only made available the classic double-spaced nicely formatted PDF, but also a more compressed two-column single-spaced version fit for printing, [...]

Existing approaches to course-based OER There are generally two approaches to course-based “big OER” (institutional OER projects, as opposed to resources released by individual professors or others). The first is the MIT OpenCourseWare approach (which has been replicated by universities across the US, and the world). Given that professors are already developing a set of materials [...]

I first became aware of the explosion in interest around foreign open courses in China when I was asked for an interview by a Chinese reporter writing about this phenomenon (interview in Chinese). Instead of the traditional 开放式课程 (kaifangshi kecheng) – quite a literal translation of “open courses / open courseware”, the new term being [...]

Ever since I began the research on my MA thesis on the Chinese Top Level Courses Project, I was aware that I wanted to get the thesis translated into Chinese. Not only because I believe it’s the only ethical thing to do – when so many people in China have gone out of their way [...]

I have always been interested in Open Educational Resources from around the world, and in my presentations, I do my best to highlight not just MIT and Stanford, but also the amazing contributions from Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, the Virtual University of Pakistan, the open textbooks from Indonesia, the Chinese Top Level [...]

Open Access Week is a great idea – now in its fourth year, it really enables communities to come together across the world to promote the concept of Open Access. Last year, we had a number of very successful events at University of Toronto, I gave a talk about institutional models for OER (video, Mp3, [...]