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The Role of Open Educational Resources (OER) in Making Education Available to All

A Principal's Reflections

I recently had the honor of traveling to the MIT campus in Boston and participating in a panel discussion on Open Education Resources (OER) at The Sixth Conference of MIT''s Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) with three illustrious advocates of these open resources: Nicole Allen, Philipp Schmidt, and panel moderator Steve Carson.

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On ZTC, OER, and a More Expansive View

Iterating Toward Openness

For the first decade of the modern open education movement (1998 – 2007), the distinguishing feature of our work – the thing we cared most about and talked most about – was the open licensing we applied to educational materials. Other schools have OER policies and OER degree programs. grey below). green below).

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Underappreciated No More: A Free Edtech Platform Shines as Schools Go Remote

Edsurge

As countless educators around the world have scrambled to figure out how to deliver lessons remotely with whisker-thin budgets, many turned to open education resources (OER). Khosla is the founder and CEO of CK-12 , the 30-person nonprofit that she started in 2007 to deliver free digital books, particularly on math and science topics.

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Showing #OpenGratitude for: ISKME and OER Commons

Iterating Toward Openness

Today I’m going to focus on ISKME and OER Commons. From their website: ISKME’s OER initiatives aim to grow a sustainable culture of sharing and continuous improvement among educators at all levels. In addition to their widely used OER search and discovery service, ISKME provides a range of other services.

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An Accidental, Systematic Attack on OER Sustainability Models

Iterating Toward Openness

Many institutions charge students a fee associated with their OER courses as a way of funding the institutions’ OER efforts. For example, Kansas State University’s Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative course fee is a $10 fee that is payed by students in courses that use OER and other free, traditionally copyrighted resources.

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Do We Need a National Open Education Strategy?

Iterating Toward Openness

Flat World Knowledge began publishing “open textbooks” in 2007, and Connexions at Rice changed their name to OpenStax and started publishing open textbooks in 2012. Of course innovation with OER didn’t actually stop with openly licensed traditional textbooks. And that’s essentially where innovation stopped.

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More College Students Are Downloading Course Materials for Free—Or Skipping Them Entirely

Edsurge

That figure includes texts procured legally, like open educational resources (known as OER), and illegally, such as pirated files shared through torrent websites. The decrease follows a trend of near-steady spending decline going back at least 10 years to 2007-2008, when students reported spending an average of $701 on course materials.

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