open education

See the following -

Open Access To Public MOOCs

Gary Jason | American Thinker | June 8, 2013

A couple of recent articles on the use of MOOCs (massive open online courses) in California colleges and universities raise an interesting ethical question -- one that hasn't attracted much attention, but certainly merits it.  The issue I have in mind concerns the ownership and control of access to MOOCs produced at publicly funded universities. Read More »

Open Clinical Anatomy Course: Is This the Future of Medical Education?

Natalie Lafferty | E-LIME | January 16, 2012

Stanford University will be running an open course on Clinical Anatomy as part of it’s growing offering of open educational courses. The first clinical anatomy course will focus on the upper limb and kicks off on the 5th March with more courses being planned including one on the anatomy of the head and neck. Read More »

Open Education: There Isn't an App for That

Open source software has saved my district-Penn Manor School District in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania-more than a million dollars on its technology budget. But more importantly, making a deliberate and concerted effort to infuse open principles and practices into our learning environments has cultivated a vibrant and inclusive learning community that cuts across the school. And as a result, student success has exceeded our expectations. But how do schools put open ideas into practice to foster future innovators and leaders? It's not as simple as installing Linux on 4,000 student laptops, holding hands, and singing the alma mater in the high school cafeteria.

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Open Educational Resource University Is Launched

Peta Lee | University World News | November 1, 2013

Free, credit-bearing online learning has become accessible for students worldwide. The Open Educational Resource university, or OERu – a project of the UNESCO-Commonwealth of Learning OER Chair network – was unveiled on 1 November, promising to “revolutionise tertiary learning”. Read More »

Open Educational Resources Expand Access To Higher Education In The United States

Michael Carroll | infojustice.org | March 14, 2014

Leaders in the Obama Administration, in state governments, and in corporate America have acknowledged the urgency of increasing access to higher education in the United States – particularly through community colleges.  These leaders also recognize the importance of improving completion rates and educational outcomes for those who enroll.

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Open Is the Solution to Improving 21st Century Education

Much of the Internet runs Linux and open source software, yet in most of our schools—whether PK-12 or higher education—Linux and open source software are given short shrift. Linux has made serious inroads on hand-held devices, the desktop, and the Internet of things (IoT) that use platforms such as Raspberry Pi, Galileo, and Arduino. Despite this astounding growth, a relatively small number of secondary and post-secondary schools offer technology training that prepares students for increasingly in-demand technical skills. The growth of the maker movement and the concurrent interest in STEM skills, which include coding and ethical hacking, may provide a much-needed impetus to change this trend. The problem for most schools is finding the mentors and exemplars of this paradigm...

Open Source Space Academy Opens in Nairobi

Nairobi's Tunapanda Institute has been using open source tools to provide technology, design, and business training in East Africa since its inception in 2013. Next year the school will launch a "space academy" to inspire young people to think about some of the most critical challenges facing humanity on this planet and beyond. Tunapanda's founders believe that everyone should have the opportunity to help shape the future, and in order for that to happen there must be learning materials and tools that are open, shareable, and unrestricted so that anyone, no matter their financial or educational background, can learn and be inspired.

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Open Textbooks 4 Africa

The first Open Textbook Summit in Africa was hosted in Cape Town on March 11-12 by Open Textbooks for Africa (OT4A). This two-day event bought together 45 local University lecturers, open education practitioners, and open textbooks experts from around the world. OT4A is a pilot project designed to support the adoption and adaption of currently available open textbooks as well as build and design our own textbooks to showcase African knowledge to the world.

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Open Textbooks Gain in Push for College Affordability

Michael Melia | eCampus News | February 19, 2016

The standard textbook for Fundamentals of General Chemistry I at the University of Connecticut has a list price of $303. For students who use the version professor Edward Neth is preparing for the fall semester, the cost will be zero. An early adopter of open source textbooks, Neth said he turned to the new technology out of frustration with spiraling prices of commercial textbooks. “It’s seeing the costs go up every semester and almost feeling powerless,” Neth said...

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OpenCon: Students And Early-Career Researchers For Open Access, Open Education, And Open Data

Abby Clobridge | Information Today, Inc. | December 2, 2014

OpenCon, the first full conference for students and early-career researchers that’s focused on the open knowledge trifecta—open access (OA), open education, and open data—was anything but a typical event...

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OPENPediatrics Open Sources Medical Diagrams and Animations

OPENPediatrics (OP), a free online education and best practice sharing community for pediatric clinicians worldwide, has launched a new library of openly licensed medical animations and illustrations, making them available for non-commercial educational use. The new multimedia library draws on the extensive collection of animations and illustrations developed for didactic and procedural videos created for the OP clinician community site.

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OpenStax Provides Cheaper Textbooks and Better Access for Higher Ed Students

OpenStax was founded by Rice University engineering professor Richard Baraniuk in 1999 under the name Connexions. It started like most open source projects: To scratch an itch and address a problem. In this case, Rice University wanted to do something on the web related to education. A grad student suggested that they take the model used to develop Linux and apply it to create textbooks, and Connexions was born. They decided on a license that allowed for reuse with attribution—in essence, this was the first use of the Creative Commons license even before the license existed.

Peter Suber on "Opening Access to Research"

Why remove any restrictions at all? The answer is to share knowledge and accelerate research. Barrier-free access helps readers find and retrieve the research they need, and helps authors reach readers who can apply, cite and build on their work. Knowledge has always been a “public good” in the theoretical sense that consumption doesn’t deplete it (it’s “nonrivalrous”) and consumption is available to all (it’s “nonexcludable”). OA makes knowledge a public good in practice.

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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to be keynote speaker for Open Summit

Press Release | Apereo Foundation | February 25, 2016

Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat...will be the opening keynote speaker for the inaugural Open Summit, a forum for college and university leaders, taking place May 23rd, 2016 at New York University's Washington Square Campus. The Open Summit will explore the increasingly expanding domain of open educational initiatives, and assess their impact across the campus and curriculum. The event will bring together a broad base of educational stakeholders to share best practices in open education, common understanding of open approaches, and strategic directions, in order to better facilitate communication and synchronization across the emerging open landscape.

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Schools Aren't Teaching Kids To Code; Here's Who Is Filling The Gap

Selena Larson | Say Media Inc. | October 18, 2013

Learning to code is all the rage these days, but not in one place that matters a lot: U.S. schools. U.S. students already significantly lag their global counterparts where math and science skills are concerned. But computer science is in even worse shape: Of 12 technical subjects examined in a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics, computer science was the only one that declined in student popularity from 1990 to 2009 (p. 49)...

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