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 [...]

I have been thinking about the issue of “equitable access to governance in globally distributed multilingual organizations” for several years now. That’s a mouth-full, but basically the idea is that you have organizations like Wikipedia, the KDE project (an open-source desktop) or iCommons. Although these kind of organizations are often legally based in the US [...]

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’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 [...]

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. [...]

I gave a presentation at OISE Education Commons today, together with Professor Jim Slotta, entitled “Open education around the world”. I was very grateful to be invited by Education Commons to give one of their talk, since they only feature one or two each semester. I was also very lucky to be working together with [...]

I’ve been interested in accreditation/evaluation of Open Education for a long time, and when we discussed a number of different theoretical approaches to the purpose of schooling, and the purpose of accreditation, in class, I realized that it would be very interesting to try to apply these theories to the problem of accreditation of open [...]

Education Commons is the unit at OISE that handles all the technology needs for teaching, learning and research and they run an infrequent speaker’s series on topics that would interest graduate students and faculty. Last fall, Leslie Chan presented on open access (video), and at that time he very generously proposed me as a future [...]

I first went to the annual Comparative and International Education Society conference last year, when it was held at Columbia University. It’s a huge event, with something like 3.000+ attendees, including a very hefty component from OISE, both professors and graduate students. It was great going there only as a participant, and getting the feel [...]