Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
Openness is a fundamental value underlying significant changes in society and is a prerequisite to changes institutions of higher education need to make in order to remain relevant to the society in which they exist. There are a number of ways institutions can be more open, including programs of open sharing of educational materials. Individual faculty can also choose to be more open without... more
Open Textbook Proof-of-Concept via Connexions
To address the high cost of textbooks, Rice University?s Connexions and the Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP) collaborated to develop a proof-of-concept free and open textbook. The proof-of-concept served to document a workflow process that would support adoption of open textbooks. Open textbooks provide faculty and students with a low cost alternative to traditional publishers... more
Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability
In an attempt to understand the potential of OER for change and sustainability, this paper presents the results of an informal survey of active and inactive collections of online educational resources, emphasizing data related to collection longevity and the project attributes associated with it. Through an analysis of the results of this survey, in combination with other surveys of OER... more
Incentives and Disincentives for Use of Open Courseware.
This article examines Utah residents' views of incentives and disincentives for the use of OpenCourseWare (OCW), and how they fit into the theoretical framework of perceived innovation attributes established by Rogers (1983). Rogers identified five categories of perceived innovation attributes: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. A survey... more
From Open Content to Open Course Models: Increasing Access and Enabling Global Participation in Higher Education
Two of the major challenges to international students' right of access to higher education are geographical/economic isolation and academic literacy in English (Carey, 1999; Hamel, 2007). The authors propose that adopting open course models in traditional universities, through blended or online delivery, can offer benefits to the institutions and to the open education movement itself, in... more
Open Educational Resources Policy Background - Brigham Young University. IPT 692R :: Summer 2009
Although this document contains some of the religious ideology of the Brigham Young University, some of their staff are leading thinkers in open education resources theory. The policy document is therefore a useful reference for OERAfrica more
Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds: A collection of case studies about MIT OpenCourseWare
A collection of case studies about MIT OpenCourseWare more
Creating, Doing, and Sustaining OER: Lessons from Six Open Educational Resource Projects
A relatively recent global movement, the development of free-to-use open educational resources (OER) has generated a dynamic field of widespread interest and study regarding methods for creating and sustaining OER. To help foster a thriving OER movement with potential for knowledge-sharing across program, organizational and national boundaries, the Institute for Knowledge Management in... more
Building Open Educational Resources from the Ground Up: South Africa's Free High School Science Texts
Partly because the development of open educational resources (OER) is a relatively new field that is just now receiving more widespread attention and study, there have been few opportunities to share knowledge across program, organizational and national boundaries. This paper presents a study of the OER project Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) as the first of a series of steps meant to... more
Open Textbooks: Why? What? How? When?
The cost of traditional textbooks has skyrocketed. The effect of this increase in cost, and the reasons for it, are somewhat different in higher education than in K-12 education. The cost of textbooks in higher education is usually borne directly by the students and their parents, and it is now a noticeable fraction of the total and rapidly increasing cost of higher education. The average... more
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