I have been very interested in the work of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) for a long time. It’s one of the mega-universities in the world, perhaps the biggest, with close to two million students. I wrote a very excited post earlier about how they have opened almost all of their educational material, and [...]

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 [...]

In September, someone called from L’Actualité, a weekly magazine based in Montreal, and wanted to interview me about Peer2Peer University. The final article keeps mentioning us in the same sentence as University of the People, whereas I think we are quite different, but it’s great to get the word out to the over one million [...]

I love when different “open” movements can come together and mutually enhance each other, whether it’s using open source software for the production of open educational materials, or using CC-licensed music when creating a CC-licensed documentary. John Willinsky, who recently gave a talk at OISE as part of OA week 2009, has written an article [...]

I just came across a newsreport on the Swedish television site (in Swedish) about “top teachers” in Korea. This teachers work at the different cram schools, and their lessons are also filmed and made available online for a subscription fee. Some of these teachers have become virtual superstars, making more than $10 million per year, [...]

Recently, both Leigh Blackall and Dave Cormier have blogged about OER as the new colonialism, and on both blogs there were lively discussions in the comment sections about what this meant. One of the ideas discussed is that if you try to bring Creative Commons to a context where copyright generally isn’t well respected, you [...]

I’ve been aware of Leigh Blackall for a long time, and have found his work and writings consistently very inspiring and interesting. Leigh works for Otago Polytechnic, which is an inspiring example of how an institution can “go open” (see their mini-documentary). I remember emailing him during last Open Education conference, saying that I had [...]

I just finished a blog post about Sean Duncan’s PhD dissertation about reuse of learning objects, which was quite critical. And I asked myself for a second whether I should publish it or not. Would it make anyone upset (him, his supervisors)? Was it aggressive or uneccessary? I don’t think so. I think part of [...]

I’m stuck at Dubai airport for 12 hours, coming from Beijing, and transiting to Milan, where I will be attending ElPub 2009 (and later OAI6 in Geneva). I could go downtown, but I’ll be spending four days in Dubai on the way back, so it didn’t seem worth it. The airport isn’t that exciting, but [...]

SocialLearnLab (or 教育大发现, which is their Chinese name) is a unique online community of students, professors and teachers interested in online education, Web 2.0 and open education. Initiated by Beijing Normal University professor Zhuang Xiaoli (庄秀丽), they run several very active mailing lists, wikis, and use a number of Chinese and international social networking apps. [...]