Research:Open Education Resources

From where I sit - Everyone wins in this free-for-all
 * 2011-02-11 (from Wayne Macintosh
 * http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=415115&c=1


 * 2011-02-16
 * University of Southern Queensland plan for free online university (February 16, 2011 )
 * http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/university-of-southern-queensland-plan-for-free-online-university/story-e6frgcjx-1226006531939

UNESCO

 * 2011-02-08 (from Wayne Macintosh)
 * http://www.wsis-community.org/pg/groups/14358/open-educational-resources-oer/
 * UNESCO have established a social networking platform for OER community discussions with particular emphasis on building policy for sustainable OER futures.
 * Abel Caine and the team at the UNESCO's Communication and Information sector because:
 * This fills an important gap in the burgeoning field of OER -- namely focused international discussions on policy development for open education.
 * UNESCO have listened to the feedback and comments from many OER practitioners around the world for a web-based environment for these open discussions - preferably a list which remains open and not "closed down" after each scheduled discussion.
 * Running the platform using the popular open source elgg ( http://www.elgg.org/ ) environement. I understand that UNESCO have contributed code improvements back to the community. Well done UNESCO!

Beyond delivering personal OERs
WikiResearcher

From Wayne.. There are already professors at public and private universities publishing textbooks in PDF form under Creative Commons licenses. See, for example, the California Free Digital Textbook Initiative, http://www.clrn.org/fdti/ , and the much more extensive listings at http://www.librarianchick.com/ which also include public domain government education resources along with free (as in beer but not as in speech) content that users may not modify and redistribute.

OERu
Funding of the OERu international collaboration
 * Themes
 * Who writes content? Subject matter experts. Where are they chosen from? Reputable universities?
 * Resources
 * OERu concept: http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/About
 * Logic model: http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/Logic_model

Courses will be based solely on OER (existing plus new OER donated by participating institutions). Tutor support will be provided through "Academic Volunteers International". The shared infrastructure needed for the OERu network collaboration is funded by the OER Foundation. The OER Foundation is a non-profit entity which that provides leadership, international networking and support for educators and educational institutions to achieve their objectives through Open Education.

The OER Foundation derives funding from institutional membership contributions, general public donations, government contracts and contributions from international agencies. We work collaboratively on developing grant proposals from the international donor community for strategic components of the ecosystem (i.e. not operational funding.). So for example, the Hewlett Foundation have funded the Learning4Content project -- which is the world's largest training initiative to build wiki skills for collaborative OER development in the formal education sector.

UNESCO provided funding support for streaming the international planning meeting for the OERu on the Internet and has offered to host the ongoing planning discussions for the OER university. UNESCO has also contributed to important strategic components which are necessary for the OERu, for example capacity development in open content licensing -- where we provide free training on copyright, creative commons etc. The OER Foundation has received funding support from the Commonwealth of Learning in Vancouver towards the infrastructure support of WikiEducator - -a flagship initiative of the OER Foundation.

Single Signon

Wikiresources: Educator/Versity/Commons

Creative Commons

WikiResearcher

Cloud based