Serendipity35 - Open Everything

More Open Courses for the K12 Community Now Offered By Saylor.org

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 21 May 2013 07:19:00 -0400

Saylor.org, a longtime member of the open education community, announced a new K12 program of open online courses.

The academic courses are aligned to the Common Core State Standards and use open educational resources (OER) extensively, making the courses, as well as their contents, widely reusable by students, teachers, and parents nationwide.

The list of the K12 courses also suggests ways to use and reuse the courses.

Teachers can flip their classroom without shooting thei own videos and incorporate more engaging digital content into classes.

Schools can get current, Common Core-aligned materials for free.

Parents can provide extra resources to supplement what kids learn in school and accelerate or review subjects. It offers a self-contained curriculum for home school families.

And, on their own, students can do more challenging work or subjects their school might not offer. It will give you experience in learning in a different way and acclimate to an online learning environment which is common in colleges. You can also review material you learned in school and go further and prepare for your SATs/college.

(And I made it through this entire post without once saying "MOOC.")

Educating K12 Teachers With MOOCs and Open Education

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:24:00 -0400

If MOOCs, or more accurately, open education, is going to actually "revolutionize" education, it will have to change not only how we learn but how we teach.

Coursera, probably the biggest player in massive open online courses now, announced a partnership with 12 top professional development programs and schools of education to open up training and development courses (28 to start) to teachers worldwide. The company says it wants to "create a hub of teacher professional development courses aimed at providing teachers, parents, and anyone else who teaches with the tools and skills to help build stronger education systems.”

There is also a new project called MOOC-Ed (for "massive open online courses for educators) from the Alliance for Excellent Education which is an advocacy organization involved in encouraging digital education in partnership with North Carolina State University’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, at the College of Education.

The first free online class they offered aims at providing thousands of regional administrators in the U.S. help using technology effectively to meet the needs of their school. The seven-week course was set for April 8 to May 24 and was designed for principals, curriculum directors, superintendents, finance officials, tech directors, and others that plan technology use for K-12th grade.

It is always difficult to pick a "good time" of the year, week, or day to get educators to commit to a few hours of professional development. Asynchronous, online courses may be the best solution to scheduling. For the MOOC-Ed course, it was recommended that you needed to commit 2-4 hours per week for the course.

MOOCs for students in the K-12 environment might have more issues than in higher education. (Although all the MOOC reports I have seen on demographics, including my own course, report high school age students participating.) But using open courses to assist in teacher professional development and increase their their knowledge of technology might work very well.

In the "Academia and the MOOC" course I just completed, even though the participants were mostly from higher education, threads of discussion emerged on using MOOCs in K12 education, corporate training, professional development and, of course, lifelong learners who just want to learn new things without any concern for credit.

Coursera has partnered with the College of Education, University of Washington; Curry School of Education, University of Virginia; Johns Hopkins University School of Education; Match Education’s Sposato Graduate School of Education; Peabody College of education and human development, Vanderbilt University; Relay Graduate School of Education; and University of California, Irvine Extension. They also are partnering with institutions and museums, including the American Museum of Natural History, The Commonwealth Education Trust, Exploratorium, The Museum of Modern Art, and New Teacher Center. This is the first time Coursera is partnering with non-degree-bearing institutions and their first attempt to work with early childhood and K-12-level education.

As with the university courses Coursera offers, these education courses will have video lectures, peer forums, supplemental
materials and interactive components.

In their newly-added category “Teacher Professional Development,” you will find:

“Common Core in Action: Literacy Across Content Areas,” from the New Teacher Center
“Teaching Character and Creating Positive Classroom,” from Relay Graduate School of Education taught by Dave Levin, the co-founder of KIPP
“The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model for 21st Century Schools” taught by Mariale Hardiman of John Hopkins School of Education
“Effective Classroom Interactions: Supporting Young Children’s Development,” from UVA, taught by Bridget Hamre, Grace Funk, Allison Leach and Kathy Neesen
“Tinkering Fundamentals: Integrating Making Activities into Your STEM Classroom,” from the Exploratorium
“Student Thinking at the Core,” taught by Barbara Stengel and Marcy Singer-Gabella of Vanderbilt University
“Coaching Teachers: Promoting Changes that Stick,” taught by Orin Gutlerner of Match Education
Three science content focused courses for Educators taught by the American Museum of Natural History
Eight part series on the Foundations of Teaching for Learning aimed at teachers in the developing world taught by Commonwealth Education Trust

Opening the Access to Scholarly Research

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:08:00 -0400

Open Access promo buttons - photo by biblioteekje, on Flickr

I was listening recently to an episode of The Chronicle's Tech Therapy podcast on the "Moral Imperative" for Open Access to scholarly research featuring David Parry. He is an Assistant Professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas and his main point was that scholars have an obligation to publish their research in journals that make free copies available online.

This is a topic that I am interested in and I agree with Parry. This is also a hot and debatable topic tight now. Unfortunately, it was the suicide of Aaron Swartz after he was being prosecuted for trying to free such research that brought it to many mainstream news outlets.

"Information is power," Swartz wrote. "But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." He had made unauthorized downloads of more than four million articles from JSTOR and the federal indictment against him said that he did it in order to then upload them to the Internet and make them available for free.

His approach was radical and was compared on news outlets to Wikleaks. The tragedy in his case was that even though the civil complaints against him were dropped and he had returned all the downloaded data, the case was still being pursued.

David Parry calls sites like JSTOR "knowledge cartels."

The term "open" and open access (OA) has a number of meanings. According to Wikipedia (itself an open site), open access can be defined as "the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. There are a growing number of theses, scholarly monographs, articles and book chapters that are provided with open access to all.

There are two degrees of open access: gratis OA meaning no-cost online access, and libre OA which is like gratis but with some additional usage rights.

Similarly, we use the term "open content" with materials available online where the author(s) gives the right to modify the work and reuse it. Most of us went through school learning to use content intact and to associate it with an author(s).

You might be familiar with Creative Commons licenses that can be used to make content accessible and yet to specify usage rights (such as attribution or non-commercial usage). This blog uses a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license for the content.

The open access concept was pushed forward at a rapid pace by the Internet, and in education it was pushed by its extension into learning objects and other resources used in online learning.

Scholarly publishing, much like the music and film industry and traditional publishing, has resisted open access, and may very well find that resistance to be why it will disappear.

You can listen to the Tech Therapy podcast on The Chronicle site or subscribe to it with iTunes.

Open SUNY

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 06:19:00 -0400

If you read about the Open SUNY announcement recently, you probably thought of it as another MOOC story. But it's more than that. You have one of the largest statewide systems in the U.S. trying to shorten up their time-to-graduation rate and also lower student costs.

The way they are planning to do that is in part by using Open SUNY to expand access to public higher education by leveraging existing programs or experiments already in place at member campuses or at the system level.

It has strong ties to Open Educational Resources (OER) concepts.

It build upon on SUNY’s current open and online initiatives. They claim that Open SUNY has "the potential to be America’s most extensive distance learning environment." That's strong language, but they are big enough to make the claim as a system.

The hope is to provide students with affordable, innovative, and flexible education in a full range of instructional formats, both online and on site.

It will network students with faculty and peers from across the state and throughout the world using social technologies and linking to open educational resources.

I knew about Open SUNY mainly because of their connection with the College Open Textbook group which I have participated in for several years. Open SUNY has their own Open Textbooks initiative and when they offered a course through Blackboard’s CourseSites, I registered for their "Locating, Creating, Licensing and Utilizing OERs" to see the content and how they were using CourseSites.

One of the stated goals of Open SUNY is to expand access to public higher education:

Launch of Open SUNY in 2014, including 10 online bachelor’s degree programs that meet high-need workforce demands, three
of which will be piloted in the fall. Open SUNY will leverage online degree offerings at every SUNY campus, making them available to students system-wide using a common set of online tools, including a financial aid consortium so that credits and aid can be received by students across campuses. Chancellor Zimpher said Open SUNY enrollment will reach 100,000 students within three years, making it the largest online education presence of any public institution in the nation.

These are some of the measures that Open SUNY will use to see how significant the experiment contributes to:

reducing the time to degree;

reducing the overall cost of obtaining a SUNY degree;

meeting workforce and societal needs;

improved graduate outcomes;

increasing the SUNY completion rates;

increasing the number of online learners;

enhancing the profile of SUNY as an innovative leader in teaching and learning

Open Professional Development

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:22:00 -0400

I was asked to do some professional development at another college and part of what they are looking to do is use more open educational resources (OER). They would like the sessions to use OER in order to encourage adoption of open educational resources.

It is not an unusual request. I have found a number of professional development planning projects online and tips on encouraging adoption of OER through professional development.

Teachers need help getting through the volume of resources available. Professional development sessions can introduce useful tools that have been vetted and get people started in using them.

As with any technology, faculty have varied comfort levels with it. I'm not a big advocate of bell curves, but it does seem to work with professional development. You need your faculty "champions" to help others see the advantages in the tech. Faculty-to-faculty PD always seems to have a better acceptance rate.

I wouldn't introduce OER into a department or school that didn't already have some culture of professional development. Faculty and administrators (in some cases, students) should be involved. PD should be a regular occurrence and not a once a semester or year "day" full of workshops.

The best professional development doesn't just train people. It also empowers them. People need to hear the success stories from their peers.

More at iskme.org/our-work/oer-training-and-professional-development

Open Education Week

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:52:33 -0400

This week is Open Education Week, a time to celebrate the open education movement.

Word comes to me from P2PU about events like Open Video Sudan, a forum for improving “A Look at Open Video” and creating new courses and resources on open video in Sudan and P2PU's Karen Fasimpaur who will be talking about Peer Learning this Wednesday.

They are announcing that their School of Open community has launched its first set of courses. This is the place to be to learn everything about anything open. Sign-up for facilitated courses is open already and courses will start during the week of March 18. Learn more about the School of Open, and their partners at Creative Commons.

An Open Course on Open Educational Resources

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 06:43:00 -0500

Open Educational Resources (OER) are part of what is changing and will be changing education at all levels. But if you don't know what OER means, then a new course being offered may be a good entry point for you.

OER-101 is an open, self-paced online community course that has been
built to demonstrate how to find, adapt, and develop OERs step-by-step. These OERs may then be licensed via Creative Commons, printed and bound, and integrated into any type of learning environment.

The goals of OER-101 include: defining OERs, demonstrating how to create and interact with them, and exploring how to include them in the teaching and learning processes. The course materials have been designed and chosen with practicality, simplicity, and applicability in mind.

I like that the participants in the course are strongly encouraged to submit the OERs they develop to an OER repository under a Creative Commons license.

The course is organized into five “pursuits,” each of which represents one facet of the world of OERs. Participants are encouraged to complete all of the pursuits by following the suggested course progression, but each pursuit can also be completed individually.

The course will be offered through Blackboard’s CourseSites and participants may self-enroll in the course by creating a free account from https://opensuny.coursesites.com. Use the LOGIN button at the top of the page. The course opened January 16, but materials are due to be available on the 23rd.

The providers are also exploring the possibilities of offering badges in open courses. For evaluation and feedback, OER-101 will employ a badging system powered by Mozilla Open Badges. The badging experiment is funded by a SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grant. Participants will earn badges by completing the course pursuits and will receive a "master badge" for course completion.

The course will utilize a community learning model informed by a facilitation method established by Philyse Banner at the American Public University System.

The results from this course will be documented within the SUNY Learning Commons.

Here's a fun (and open) "trailer" for the course.

CFP for Open Education Week

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:01:00 -0500

Open Education Week is March 11-15, 2013.

The goal is to raise awareness about open education and open educational resources.

Participation from around the world, in multiple languages, is encouraged.

Submit proposals at http://tinyurl.com/openedweekproposal no later than January 18.

There are many ways to get involved:

- Provide a Project Showcase highlighting some aspect of open education in your project, organization, region or country
- Offer a webinar or virtual Question and Answer session on a topic of interest
- Create or share basic resources about the open education movement
- Host a local event during Open Education Week
- Form a Working Group to address a common problem or opportunity
- Propose another activity—we invite you to be creative!

Contribute your skills to creating, organizing, coordinating or spreading the word about Open Education Week.

For more information, see Contributor's Frequently Asked Questions at http://tinyurl.com/OEWconrtibutorsFAQ

You can follow on Twitter at #openeducationwk, on Facebook at facebook.com/openeducationwk, or contact them at info@openeducationweek.org

Get a Free Elite Education

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 28 May 2012 09:09:00 -0400

Udemy, the company that allows any us to create and sell courses through its online platform, also has "The Faculty Project." This part of their site is devoted to courses by professors from some of the country's elite institutions.

Udemy is a for-profit, but The Faculty Project offerings from Colgate, Duke University, Stanford University, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, Dartmouth College and Vassar College are free.

Obviously, their goals with the project are to get you in with a free course in the hope that you will pay for another course, and those top schools help elevate the brand.

Some of the courses seem to be a collection of informational lectures, which is not my idea of a good online "course" but you can certainly learn from them. There have been mentions online of plans to administer quizzes and grades/badges. You don't submit work and you don't get feedback. its anticipated droves of students, which may number in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

It might be worthwhile for other colleges to look at their courses as a model for developing quality courses on a budget. Udemy says it is developing the Faculty Project courses at $500 apiece.

U of Minnesota Open Textbook Project

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:18:00 -0400

I have been an advocate for open textbooks. I think they are a good way to cut costs and put more textbooks in the hands of our students. But I'll admit that they are not widely used.

There are a number of possible reasons for that. They aren't easy to find, even though there are a number of sites that collect open and free titles. Instructors don't always trust that titles are "as good" as commercial textbooks. It also takes time to review titles for adoption.

The University of Minnesota has started its own online catalog of open books. In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development created the catalog to be reviewed by faculty members. The books are all released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license, and instructors can customize the books to fit their course needs.

Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks. The university will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books, and professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500. (The money comes from donor funds.)

They hope to address faculty concerns about locating texts and having quality control over titles that have been peer-reviewed. They have almost a hundred books in the catalog.

Although it is encouraging that UM is working to get open textbooks used on campus, I find it discouraging that they need to duplicate the efforts of other repositories that are collecting textbooks and reviews on a larger scale.

What do you consider the most important criteria in choosing an open textbook for use in your teaching? Check my list and vote here.

Mozilla's Open Badges Project

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:19:00 -0400

I sat in on a webinar today about how Mozilla and others are using badges as a way of recognizing and legitimizing learning and skill development that happens outside of the classroom. (I assume the webinar will be archived at connectedlearning.tv/webinar-archive.)

The concept of issuing badges is usually compared to the scouting merit and skill badges that have been around for a long time, and the badges that come for game achievements.

The main presenter was Erin Knight - Senior Learning Director at Mozilla - who currently spearheads the learning and badge work, overseeing the building of learning pathways for webmaker skills, as well as the development of the Open Badge Infrastructure.

The Mozilla Open Badge infrastructure enables any organization or community to issue badges backed by their own seal of approval. Learners/users can then collect badges from different sources and share them across the web, unlocking new career and learning opportunities.

Here is some of what I culled from the session and the Mozilla site:

There are countless examples of learning occurring through informal channels. The web and other new learning spaces provide exciting new ways to gain skills and experiences—from online courses, learning networks and mentorship to peer learning, volunteering and after-school programs.

While degrees do convey information about people’s skills, they often tend to be abstracted from the actual learning that has occurred. Two people with the same degree may have taken very different learning pathways or developed different skills. Many people without a formal degree possess a vast set of job-relevant skills. Badges help by providing a more complete picture, recognizing a more granular set of skills.

I good real world example of that is resumes. Resumes are documents that people write themselves and granular information on a resume is often difficult to validate. With digital badges, users can click on a given badge to access information about the badge’s issuer, how the badge was earned, and more. In other words, badges can go beyond traditional resumes by providing built-in evidence for validation.

The Mozilla Open Badge site OpenBadges.org (still beta) can get you started on using, creating and issuing badges.

Mozilla started with this project in 2010 and is now at the point of a public beta. On the Mozilla blog they discussed the Open Badges Infrastructure entering public beta which allows badge issuers and developers to have access to the software that will allow them to build badges.

Though I am viewing all this through my academic lenses (and with the idea that school credit will be changing radically in the near future), most of these badge efforts are from online or out-of-school learning situations. For example, the past year they have been used by NASA, Disney-Pixar and 4H.
The public-beta adds new features like an improved badge issuer API and new ways for users to manage their badges.

Mozilla has a "Badge Backpack” so that users can store, manage, import and group badges earned from multiple sites in a single location. A new displayer API will make it easier to display digital badges across the web, from personal web sites to social networking platforms. There are also documentation and privacy features, including an updated privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs for developers. The hope is that they can get from beta to version 1.0 by the end of the year.

If you want to start working with Open Badges right now, check out the developer documentation and source code.

The Mozilla project it totally new to me, but I did learn the basics about Open Badges (and earn my first 2 badges) today.

The webinar was via Connected Learning's Livestream channel. They offer a lot of education webinars using Livestream, Google+ Hangouts etc. Their Twitter hashtag is #connectedlearning.

Open Education Week 2012 CFP

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:28:00 -0500

Here's a CFP that is a call for "participation" (rather than proposals) for Open Education Week March 5-10, 2012 which will be held online and worldwide. It is organized by the Open Courseware Consortium.

Join your colleagues around the world to increase understanding about open education. Open Education Week occurs online and in locally hosted events around the world. The objective is to raise awareness of the open education movement and open educational resources.

There are several ways you and your organization can be involved:

1. Provide a pre-recorded informational virtual tour of your project, work, or organization. This should be focused on the work you’re doing in open education, designed for a general audience. These can be done in any language.

2. Offer a webinar. Webinars are well suited for topics of general interest, such as what’s happening in open education in a particular area or country, or topics that offer discussion possibilities. Webinars can be scheduled in any language, 24 hours a day. Organizers would also like to feature question and answer sessions in a variety of languages and time zones.

3. Pre-record a presentation on open education concepts. Do you have an inspiring presentation about open education? Can you discuss the issues that open education seeks to address in your country, region or globally? Organizers plan to feature short, introductory overviews of open education and OER for different audiences, such as those new to the idea, policy makers, faculty, etc. Presentations in any language are welcome.

4. Create or share text-based, downloadable information. This should be information on the open education movement, in any language, appropriate to introduce the movement and its important concepts to a variety of audiences. Specific information on your project can be linked to from the open education week website.

5. Sponsor or host a local event during the week of 5-10 March. This could be a community discussions, a forum on open education, a challenge and/or a celebration. Organizers invite you to get creative with planning events. Suggestions and support will be available on the open education week web site, and the planning group is happy to work with you to create bigger impact.

Let Open Education Week organizers know how you would like to participate by filling out the form at the www.openeducationweek.org website, or contacting them at openeducationwk@gmail.com. Please fill out the Open Education Week contributor’s form by January 31, 2012.

The OCW Consortium is coordinating this community-run event. There is no cost to participate.

Follow them on twitter at #openeducationwk and Facebook at facebook.com/openeducationwk

Attribution: Creative Commons Blog post by Cable Green, Global Education Director