This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
These days low-cost alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, are getting a boost as a potential solution. Last week, for example, Lumen Learning, a company that sells low-cost OER textbooks and courseware, announced it received a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In a post of nearly two years ago (“ OERwashing: Beyond the Elephant Test “), I argued that the OER community lacked a reliable way to assess new entrants to the OER field, especially for-profit organizations, in terms of their support for openness and OER community values. Petrides, L., and Watson, C.E.
They were trying to prep summer courses by linking to the freely available, openly licensed alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, content offered by Lumen Learning, a courseware provider that argues that OER can be a tool in making higher education more equitable. Hi OER Friends! There was confusion. “Hi
K-12 education system by open educational resources (OER) since 2009, although my first exposure to the ideas and leaders of the movement stretch back to the launch of the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. This is where context matters most for the OER movement. Even within the U.S.
There’s great news out of the recent UNESCO meeting in Paris, where member states unanimously adopted the draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). This dramatically simplifies understanding what is and isn’t OER. Resources in the public domain or released under an open license are OER.
tl ;dr – If a resource is licensed in a way that grants you permission to engage in the 5R activities, and grants you those permissions for free, it’s an open educational resource (OER) – no matter where you find it or how it’s being used. Consider the following scenarios: A person downloads an OER to their laptop.
The number of colleges running efforts to help professors shift from published textbooks to low-cost online materials known as OER is growing rapidly. This is no longer an intellectual argument on the part of the [OER] evangelists.” As Green put it: “There’s a huge set of concerns about quality of OER by faculty.”
But fans of OER are increasingly facing a problem. While OER started off as free online textbooks, it still costs money to produce these materials, and professors often need guidance finding which ones are high quality. So OER advocates are realizing they need to change their pitch.
I’ve been interested in sustainability models for OER for decades. And for just as long, I’ve believed that there are useful lessons for us to learn on this topic from open source software – OER’s far more popular and influential sibling. What does “bug” mean in the context of OER?
Lumen Learning, a company that sells low-cost OER textbooks and courseware, plans to start offering professional development services for faculty that can be bundled with its titles. In other words, some of its textbooks are now sold with coaching on how to teach with OER more effectively.
And that’s been the driver behind nonprofit Achieving the Dream ’s (ATD) OER Degree Initiative , where 38 U.S. community colleges are creating full degree programs that utilize open educational resources (OER) from start to finish.
At OpenEd18 I gave a presentation titled “Questioning the OER Orthodoxy: Is the Commons the Right Metaphor for our Work?” After this brief discussion, I asked “what if the commons is the wrong metaphor for our work with OER?” During the presentation, I shared the following contrasts between a commons and OER.
But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. They can with OER materials. Contrast doing something and revising quickly with a textbook company that spends seven years to devise a textbook and hopes to hell that it works.” It’s totally within our capability to do it.”
Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. And this process of making OER more effective every semester – also known as “continuous improvement” – is where we see some of the most exciting opportunities to collaborate with faculty.
One crucial part of the decision is out of the students’ hands, of course, since it is the professor who decides what textbook or material to assign—or whether to skip commercial textbooks altogether and assign a free or low-cost open educational resource, or OER. He tends to buy used textbooks because they are cheaper. a semester.
They understood the outsized influence that billion dollar behemoths like Microsoft would continue to have, and knew that the only way the open source model could “win” would be if proprietary software companies adopted it. These are huge companies that compete directly with each other in many ways.
In May, the homework-help site that relies on student-generated content, Course Hero, dipped its toes into freely available, openly licensed alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, course materials. This was the company’s “first foray” into OER, and it is still figuring out how the OER fits, Morris says. “I
Open Educational Resources (OER) have yet to cozy up with the more orthodox academics and pushy print publishers of the world. The most recent example occurred this week, when OERcompany Lumen Learning announced a partnership with one of the country’s largest textbook distributors, Follet Corporation.
I said my piece in the updated article that spurred my original comment (including that the service the company in question provides looks “interesting and valuable,” especially in the context of the K-12 assessment market). The Pro-OER Elephant Test. Open is the New Green.
When the marketing head of a company started connecting with others through LinkedIn, he didn’t say he was “building a PLN.” When the car mechanic wanted to learn a new system, she didn’t say she was “exploring OERs through a blended, flipped approach.” ” He was connecting with others.
The initiative intends to create degree pathways with courses that only use open educational resources, known as OER, so students don’t have to spend money on class materials. College of the Canyons’ history with OER starts before Anagnonson’s dabble, however. Using OER in those courses, she added, “really started out of necessity.”
New and traditional publishers are trying to offer alternatives such as open educational resources (OER), or freely downloadable and adaptable learning materials. But some providers of OER still ask for fees in return, and that has advocates concerned. The company is also banking on authors and adopters to check for quality themselves.
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). CK-12 is at the forefront of OER by doing adaptive and personalized learning. Our model was to be more than an OER aggregator,” Khosla says. “We
I spend most of my time doing fairly tactical thinking and working focused on moving OER adoption forward in the US higher education space. In this vision of the world, OER replace traditionally copyrighted, expensive textbooks for all primary, secondary, and post-secondary courses. My end goal isn’t to increase OER adoption.
Knewton drew heaps of hype and investment by promising to provide artificial-intelligence technology to major textbook companies to make their content more adaptive. Now the company has pivoted, and it is poised to formally announce its own online courseware that will compete head-to-head with those publishing giants.
Publicly-traded companies like Wiley generally share the price of their acquisitions, unless the financial impact is considered immaterial to the buyer’s bottom line. The New York City-based company has raised more than $180 million in investment capital. 1, 2019), the company reported a more than 20-percent decline in this division.
Because I can’t stop thinking about open, I’ve been pondering the relationship between solar power and OER. ”, “How can you sell OER if they’re free? ”, “How can you sell OER if they’re free?”, ”, and “If OER are free, why would anyone pay you?”
Among them, I’ve updated my site to include a dedicated FAQ on open educational resources (OER). The FAQ is a collaboration of many involved with the movement and includes an OER infographic , suitable for downloading and re-sharing. My thanks to EdSurge for highlighting its availability. Oh, and unroll.me
Commercialization and Concentration of Power The development and control of GenAI are dominated by a few large corporations, which poses several concerns: Profiteering by Big Tech: Companies may prioritize profit over ethical considerations, impacting education negatively. Can I trust its responses to be accurate?
But this time the company disabled the “share” feature—a key component of the service. The company ended up restoring the sharing feature at the end of the summer. There was no press release, and one educator who was a beta tester said that the company seemed to be going out of its way not to talk publicly about the site.
The six-week long MOOC will touch on topics including open educational resources (OER), open pedagogy and practice, open knowledge and open research. Siemens: We’ll discuss the OER and licensing dynamics. I know you plan to use OER in the course and encourage participants to create modules using OER. What won’t it cover?
For example, my son who is studying cybersecurity recently told me prompted ChatGPT along these lines: ‘You are the hiring manager for a cybersecurity position at a large company. And for those of you who expect every post on this blog to be related to OER in some way (you did notice I changed the name of the blog, right?),
Among them, I’ve updated my site to include a dedicated FAQ on open educational resources (OER). The FAQ is a collaboration of many involved with the movement and includes an OER infographic , suitable for downloading and re-sharing. My thanks to EdSurge for highlighting its availability. Oh, and unroll.me
Earlier this week I read an op-ed – sponsored by Pearson – titled “If OER is the answer, what is the question?” OER often shine in their variety and ability to deepen resources for niche topics. ” The article poses three questions and answers them. Below I share some thoughts prompted by the article.
At that time, the company only offered math materials for grades three to six. Avraham Kadar, Elevate Education, Emerge Education, FreshFund, Y Combinator and other angel investors also participated. Tailor-ED graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator earlier this year. Now, Tailor-ED covers K-8 math.
And some credit it for helping kick-start a trend—now known as open educational resources, or OER—that has sent shockwaves through the traditional publishing industry. Some professors have aesthetic objections to OER materials. By the nonprofit’s estimates, more than half of U.S. colleges use at least one. Because most U.S.
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Andy Marcinek , Chief Open Education Advisor at the US Department of Education (ED), to explore how schools can benefit from Open Educational Resources (OERs) and what is being done in this area nationwide. So, where should district leaders interested in open education begin?
Those in the puppy camp argued, with good reason, that free curricula and OER content were hardly free once the related costs and risks were factored in. So the discovery, vetting, and alignment costs inflicted upon the teachers and districts that would try to embrace free and OER content would remain high.
It's representatives from the cake batter company. The US Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology has placed heavy emphasis on the c reation and use of OER resources in the classroom. This short video does a great job of explaining why OER matters. Below are a few of my favorite OER sites and resources.
While textbook publishing companies now offer digital versions, you can also find open textbook options online. OER Commons. OER Commons is a digital library full of open educational resources (OER). para can help your school or district easily build and distribute a digital OER textbook collection.
In conversations with edtech investors, some reported that the K-12 market has seen an influx of instructional content, particularly in the form of open educational resources (OERs). OERs are openly-licensed educational materials that can be downloaded, modified and shared with others to help support student learning.
We caught up with Cini recently for a far-ranging chat about what tools (like OER) are helping adult students and how the latest technology (like AI) could further move the needle. This conference attracts plenty of venture capitalists and companies in education. Remind people how big the OER effort is at UMUC. This was huge.
Already, the Sydney, Australia-based company has pulled back on its social media presence. On its website , the company claims it has more than 700 institutional customers across the K-12, higher education and corporate learning space. In 2014, the Gates Foundation awarded the company a $4.5 Flash will be sunsetted on Dec.
In a recent webinar about OER, organized by one of the major textbook publishers, there was a lot of conversation about whether OER are “free” or “affordable.” Before I begin though, just to be clear, allow me to reaffirm that OER are free, plain and simple, full stop, period. OER = free + permissions.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 34,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content