Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education
The guidelines outline key issues and suggestions for integrating OER into higher education to support quality teaching and learning. The aim of this document, prepared by the Secretariat, is to encourage educational stakeholders to invest in the production, adaptation, and use of OER, and to improve the quality of curricula and teaching. more
Open Courseware, Open Content, Open Practices, Open Learning: Where are the Limits?
The first part of the paper reports on the outcomes of a joint UNESCO-COL project Taking OERs beyond the OER Community: Policy and Capacity. Its purpose was to expand understanding of the potential of OERs among university leaders and quality assurance officials in Africa and Asia, who have low awareness of this phenomenon. The project concluded with an intergovernmental policy forum where... more
Fostering Open Educational Practices
OER are becoming accepted as part of the range of materials that learners and educators can use. However, the methods and practices that enable learners, teachers and institutions to best engage with OER are not yet established and may well be more important in enabling change in education systems than the availability of the resources themselves. By looking at the experiences that The Open... more
From Open Educational Resources to Open Educational Practices
This article provides an analysis of the size, shape and model of various OER initiatives. more
#Open Textbook tweet: Driving the Awareness and Adoption of Open Textbooks
This collection of tweets seeks to answer key questions for those who might support open textbooks, and the future of the open textbook movement more
Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials
Open Educational Resources (OER) offer higher education governance leaders a cost-efficient method of improving the quality of teaching and learning while at the same time reducing costs imposed on students related to the purchase of expensive commercial textbooks and learning materials. Leading scholars around the world are already participating in the OER movement even without support from most... more
How Giving Away Religious Digital Books Influences the Print Sales of Those Books
Lack of access prevents many from benefiting from educational resources. Digital technologies now enable educational resources, such as books, to be openly available to those with access to the Internet. This study examined the financial viability of a religious publisher?s putting free digital versions of eight of its books on the Internet. The total cost of putting these books online was $... more
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
OER in Developing Countries: Towards Meaningful Partnership
A keynote address by Catherine Ngugi at the Open Learning Conference 2009 in Nottingham, UK, November 2009. The focus of this address was that OER presents an opportunity to overhaul how we think about and practice higher education - and how education as a collaborative endeavour - a cornerstone of the OER movement - is far more likely to result in success than going it alone. The video... more
Harnessing Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
In this report the Committee for Economic Development examines higher education through the lens of openness. Their goal was to understand the potential impact of greater openness on colleges and universities. Like other service industries such as finance or entertainment, higher education is rooted in information?its creation, analysis, and transmission and the development of the skills... more
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