Open and Free Learning

Ideas

Learning Object
Open and Distance Learning (ODL)
Open Knowledge
Open Source
Open Content
Free Sharing

Concepts, Frameworks and Organisations

OER Open Educational Resources
FLOSS Free/Libre Open Source Software
CC Creative Commons
Open Source Curriculum (Wiki) <to review>

People

George Soros (Wiki)

OPEN LEARNING PROVIDERS

OpenLearn from the Open University (Home / Attend Free OpenLearn Courses)
Coursera (Attend Free Coursera Courses)
Open Learning - https://www.openlearning.com/ - Fun, free and social online courses

Review

Open Educational Resources (OER)

From http://wiki.creativecommons.org/OER

What is OER?
- Learning Materials
- Free to
  - Use
  - Remix
  - Redistribute
Finding OER
Resources about OER
Creative Commons and OER
- CC provide legal and technical infrastructure
- Ensure resources are
  - accessible
  - adaptable
  - inter-operatable
  - discoverable
OER Case Studies

From Wikipedia

What is OER?
- digital materials that can be re-used for
  - teaching
  - learning
  - research
- Free through open licenses, which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone.
- A mode for content creation and sharing, OER alone cannot award degrees nor provide academic or administrative support to students.
- "OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."
- creating "a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge."
Example of OER Assets
- Learning content includes
  - courses
  - course materials
  - content modules
  - learning objects
  - collections
  - journals
- Tools include software that supports the
  - creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content,
  - searching and organization of content
  - content and learning management systems
  - content development tools
  - on-line learning communities.
- Implementation resources include
  - intellectual property licenses that govern
    - open publishing of materials
    - design-principles
    - localization of content.
  - Materials on best practices such as
    - stories
    - publication
    - techniques
    - methods
    - processes
    - incentives
    - distribution
Core Attributes (OLCOS 2012 Roadmap)
- Access to open content (including metadata) is provided free of charge for educational institutions, content services, and the end-users such as teachers, students and lifelong learners;
- Content is liberally licensed for re-use in educational activities, favourably free from restrictions to modify, combine and repurpose the content; consequently, that the content should ideally be designed for easy re-use in that open content standards and formats are being employed;
- For educational systems/tools software is used for which the source code is available (i.e. Free Software/Open Source software) and that there are open Application Programming Interfaces (open APIs) and authorisations to re-use Web-based services as well as resources (e.g. for educational content RSS feeds)
History <for details go to wiki>
- The term learning object was coined in 1994 by Wayne Hodgins: popularize idea that digital materials can be designed to allow easy reuse in a wide range of teaching and learning situations.
- open and distance learning (ODL) and in the wider context of a culture of open knowledge, open source, free sharing and peer collaboration, which emerged in the late 20th century.
- Concept of open content by analogy with open source in 1998 by David Wiley: e.g. Connection between OER and Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) have many aspects in common
- The MIT OpenCourseWare project sparked a global Open Educational Resources Movement in 2001: MIT entered a partnership with the University of Utah, A/P instructional technology David Wiley set up a distributed peer support network for the OCW's content through voluntary, self-organizing communities of interest.
- The term "open educational resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries
- In 2005 OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) launched a 20-month study to analyse and map the scale and scope of initiatives regarding “open educational resources” (OER) in terms of their purpose, content, and funding.
- The report Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources, published in May 2007.
- In September 2007, the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation in Cape Town Meeting where thirty leading proponents of open education were invited to collaborate on the text of a manifesto
- The Cape Town Open Education Declaration (released on 22 January 2008) - governments and publishers to make publicly funded educational materials available at no charge via the internet.
Other OER Initiatives
- Connexions (Rice University starting is 1999).
  - In contrast to the OCW projects, content licenses are required to be open Creative Commons Attribution only license.
  - The hallmark of Connexions is the use of a custom XML format [[CNXML], designed to aid an enable mixing and reuse of the content.
- OpenCourseWare Consortium (founded in 2005)
  - To extend the reach and impact of open course materials and foster new open course materials
  - Success: 200 member institutions from around the world in 2009
  - Examples
    - MIT OpenCourseWare
    - China Open Resources for Education
    - OpenCourseWare in Japan.
- Wikieducator (August 2006)
  - a venue for planning education projects built on OER, creating and promoting open education resources(OERs), and networking towards funding proposals.
  - Wikieducator's Learning4Content project builds skills in the use of MediaWiki and related free software technologies for mass-collaboration in the authoring of free content and claims to be the world's largest wiki training project for education. By
  - Success: 86 workshops training 3,001 educators from 113 different countries by 30 June 2009
Institutional Support
- US
  - well-endowed US universities
  - William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: main financial supporter of open educational resources in the early years and has spent more than $110 million in the 2002 to 2010 period, $14 million went to MIT
  - Shuttleworth Foundation: Projects concerning collaborative content creation, has contributed as well.
- UK
  - British government $11.18m,
  - UK funding bodies
    - JISC
    - HEFCE
- UNESCO
  - leading role in "making countries aware of the potential of OER."
  - International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP) Discussions and debate on how to apply OER in practice
  - Belief that OER can widen access to quality education, particularly when shared by many countries and higher education institutions, UNESCO also champions OER as a means of promoting access, equity and quality in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- National and US State Programs
  - Bangladesh: first country to digitize a complete set of textbooks for grades 1-12.[30] Distribution is free to all.
  - Uruguay: 1,000 digital learning resources in a Request For Proposals (RFP) in June 2011.[31]
  - South Korea: digitize all of its textbooks and to provide all students with computers and digitized textbooks.[32]
  - Califonia: The California Learning Resources Network Free Digital Textbook Initiative at high school level initiated by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
  - South Africa: The Shuttleworth Foundation's Free high school science texts for South Africa
Criticisms
- Insularity and failure to connect with the larger world: "OERs will not be able to help countries reach their educational goals unless awareness of their power and potential can rapidly be expanded beyond the communities of interest that they have already attracted."
- Doubts on the altruistic motives typically claimed for OER
- Imperialism: creation and dissemination of knowledge according to the economic, political and cultural preferences of highly developed countries for the use of less developed countries is alleged to be a self-serving imposition

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)

Open Source Curriculum (OCS)

From Wiki

Definition:
- online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified.
- OSC is based on the open source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes.
- Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula.
- These “development” communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.
Examples
- OSC repositories
  - Wikiversity
  - Curriki – Global Learning & Education Community
  - MIT OpenCourseWare
  - Connexions
- are one way in which the concept of open source curriculum is being explored. With these online repositories, a curriculum framework for a particular course is created by an instructional designer or author in conjunction with content experts. Learning objectives are clearly identified, and learning activities and instructional sequences and assessments are developed and offered to support the attainment of the objectives. However, all users (from students to educators) are empowered to add, delete, and modify the learning activities, resources and generally contribute to the learning environment. In short, each user contributes to the repository and is able to select curricula based on individual interests.

The Open Content Curriculum Project was initiated with MediaWiki software in 2005, and offers a standards-based K-12 curriculum that is collaboratively edited, contains teacher- and student-created resources, assessment rubrics, lesson plans, and instructional resources. All 10,500 pages of content, and 4,240 file uploads are Creative Commons licensed, and the system is used daily by the Bering Strait School District, an Alaska school district. The project welcomes use and active contributions by outside teachers, students and other interested parties. There are currently 2,500 registered users in the database.

OpenEducator, a non-profit organization launched in March 2006 using the open source Drupal CMS, aims to support an open source curriculum development community for K-12 educators. Another project, the Open Source Learning Project, is an open source curriculum project initiated by JTG Learning Open Learning Project. This project is focused on a curriculum and training materials for emergency services and developing a resource for emergency services related research. The LAMS Community is a repository of "Learning Designs" (also known as digital lesson plans) which incorporate both content and collaborative activities into a structured flow of tasks that can be run with Learning Design software such as LAMS.

The Free Technology Academy is a joint initiative of the Free Knowledge Institute and several European universities to provide master-level education on Free Software, Open Standards and related subjects. All FTA course books are openly published under copyleft licenses. Moreover, the FTA partners together with several other institutions have started aTaskforce for the collaborative design of an International Master Programme in Free Software.

[edit]

Creative Commons

(http://creativecommons.org/)

Education
- MIT OpenCourseWare
  - releasing its materials under a CC BY-NC-SA license since 2004. Today, MIT OCW has 2000 courses available freely and openly online for anyone, anywhere to adapt, translate, and redistribute. MIT OCW have been translated into at least 10 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian. See Two MIT OCW Courses Reach Million Visit Milestone.” The OpenCourseWare concept has now spread to hundreds of universities worldwide.
- Connexions
  - Repository and collaborative platform of educational materials that breaks down larger collections, such as textbooks and courses, into basic building blocks known as modules. Each module has a corresponding web page, so educators can mix and match pages to create custom collections. All modules and collections are licensed CC BY so they can be continually edited, translated, and adapted. Collaborative Statistics is one open textbook model whose evolution is enabled by CC BY.
- CK-12 Foundation
  - addresses the growing costs of textbooks and the closed, outdated medium in which they are available. Focusing specifically on textbooks for K-12 schools, the nonprofit works with states and institutions to build web-based, collaborative “flexbooks” that are free to use and adapt via CC BY-NC-SA. The CK-12 Foundation is a major contributor to the California Free Digital Textbooks Initiative, a CA initiative that aligns open textbooks to state standards.
- Bloomsbury Academic
  - imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, publisher of the Harry Potter series. Bloomsbury Academic publishes “world-class research-based books across the humanities and social sciences, with a strong commitment to the traditional virtues of scholarly publishing, including rigorous peer-review.” Bloomsbury Academic works with its authors to use CC licenses, and has several publications available via CC BY-NC, including Lawrence Lessig’s Remix.
- Flat World Knowledge
  - commercial textbook publisher that incorporates CC licenses into its business model. Co-founded by the Director of Marketing for Prentice Hall Business Publishing, FWK makes higher education textbooks freely available via CC BY-NC-SA, allowing professors and students to adapt them to individual courses, while offering print and supplementary materials at low costs.
- Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU)
  - grassroots education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. Leveraging the internet and educational resources freely available online, P2PU provides the social environment for high-quality, low-cost education opportunities. P2PU is “Learning for everyone, by everyone about almost anything,” and it is run and governed by volunteers. It builds on educational resources that are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under Creative Commons licenses. All of its peer produced content is available under CC BY-SA.
- Curriki
  - known as the “next generation wiki” for K-12 education; it is an online community and wiki platform for teachers, learners, and education experts to share, reuse, and remix quality curricula. Teachers can find and develop resources, share lesson plans, and collaborate on courses with others in their school or around the world. All content is available under CC BY.
- Khan Academy
  - offers over 1800 instructional videos covering everything from basic algebra to advanced chemistry, biology, and even the current day banking crisis. While working at an investment fund, Salman Khan started tutoring his younger cousins in his spare time by creating and posting videos to YouTube. As the videos grew in popularity, the Khan Academy was born. 200,000+ students use the site each month, and all videos are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, with some already translated into Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, and more.

TED: On Open Source Learning

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

Keywords: knowledge ecosystem, educational DJ, community authored materials, On demand Press, Disintermediation, educational publishing, Review and Peer Review, Lenses

Example of Music Industry: From LPs to Digital Music
Create, Rip, Mix and Burn
Context: Educational Materials in Schools
Crisis and Disconnects
- Publishing process is expensive and difficult, builds wall between authors and users (teachers, Students, Readers)
- Language barriers
Thought Experiment:
- tearing out pages of books, Digitise them, store them in vast interconnected global repository (like itunes), share them
- Free access, update, improve, play with it,
- Timescale in seconds rather than 2 years for publishing.
- Build ecosystem of authors, who should be or want to be authors, from different languages and culture.
History of Connexions
- 6.5 years at Rice University
- Hardware to bring education to the world, Open source tools, free content
Examples
- Creating
  - Electrical Engineering
  - Kitty Jones: Private music teacher
- Ripping, Copying, Reusing
  - University of Texas - El Paso Engineering translations
- Mixing, Customizing, contextualise, take ownership
  - National Instruments (interactive simulations)
  - Teachers without Borders
  - UC Merced
  - 50 by 15 (Project with AMD)
- Burn
  - Publishing through community authored materials
  - On demand Press, Disintermediation
Enablers
- XML
  - semantic representation of comment, content
  - Using XML, turning pages into Lego blocks, to combine, framework to share content and create sophisticated learning machines (Books, courses, course packs)
  - Personalise learning experience to individual student (book, course customized to their learning style, context, language and things that excite them)
  - Reuse the materials in different ways, new ways
  - Interconnect ideas how fields relate to each other
    - Maths: every equation you click can be explored and experimented with
    - mathML: Chemistry texbooks, Music XML
- Intellectual Property
  - Creative commons licenses creativecommons.org
  - Linux, GPL
  - MIT Open courseware
Key Issue: Protecting plagiarism and quality control
- Review and peer review
- Design structures like TED
- Lenses: social software that can build peer review process so can focus on content in repository
Other Ideas
- Minsky's dream that all books in a library start to talk to teach other
- It's the interconnections between ideas that teaching is really all about

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