oer

Higher Ed’s in trouble, in case you hadn’t heard.

Burdened by runaway costs, unsustainable infrastructure, outrage over tuition increases, declining public dollars, and outmoded degree programs, colleges and universities are struggling to satisfy the needs of their current patrons, let alone cater to a global student population that is expected to double by 2025. » Read more

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) specification (14 properties) has been accepted and published as a part of Schema.org, the collaboration between major search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex (press release).

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Nearly every week, if not every day, there are more and more open source and open educational resources available and accessible to us. It's impossible to ignore. It also seems impossible to keep pace with the sheer volume.

Despite this, I will attempt here to give a comprehensive listing of many helpful, accessible, amazing open education resources. (There will inevitably be some left out, but here goes!)

While mainstream attention has been focused on MOOCs, the Open Educational Resource university (OERu) has been developing a parallel education offering which is distinctively open.

The OERu aims to provide free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials with pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognized education institutions.

Like MOOCs, the OERu will have free open enrollment. But OERu’s open practices go well beyond open enrollment.

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Forty years ago, John Holt wondered whether an educational revolution as profound as open education could survive unless it became part of a wider and deeper movement of social change. Until open source and the concept of an open education began to take hold, John Holt's vision of an open education seemed to be a pipe dream. » Read more

Digital technology and open educational resources have enormous potential and power with young children. For parents of special needs children, especially those who are blind or visually impaired, dyslexic, or physically or cognitively impaired, the situation is compounded. Parents usually have to advocate to ensure that teachers and schools, even preschools, have educational materials are accessible and available for their child's use. » Read more

Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Foundations are offering up to $25,000 in cash prizes to "the best short videos that explain the use and promise of free, high-quality open educational resources and describe the benefits and opportunities these materials create for teachers, students and schools". » Read more

When you’re working online and you access a text heavy web-page that scrolls for 5 pages, what is your initial reaction? To most of us, a text-heavy page filled with a long list of resources and activities is not inviting or enticing. The same is true for students and online courses. But with a little sleight of hand, plus use of the right resource formats and labels, you can design an aesthetically pleasing online course and avoid the long scrolling webpage syndrome. » Read more

If you've ever wished you could afford a Stanford University course--or just this semester's textbooks for community college, we have some interesting articles for you this week. If you've wondered how you would score on your child's standardized tests, read on. » Read more

Open Source Physics is an online curriculum resource, created and edited by a group of college professors, that provides students new ways to understand and predict physical phenomena through computational physics and computer modeling. For students who learn best by exploring and doing versus just reading this is an outstanding resource.

Open Source Physics came to fruition because these professors felt like there was a gap between what students were learning in the classroom and the skills they needed. Unfortunately, such realizations appear to be consistent within education as a whole. The authors note on the site: » Read more