Today we're honored to welcome TJ Bliss, Program Officer, Education at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to share with us the learning the Foundation has garnered in over 15 years of supporting open educational resource projects.
OpenCon 2014 was an epic milestone for the global research community. OpenCon 2015 was different. OpenCon 2015 was a storm. Never have I seen such energy, such drive, such raw creativity unleashed than on the few days we had in Brussels.
Designed to bring together students and early career researchers from all facets of research and from all corners of the globe, OpenCon 2015 is about empowering the research community to advance open data, open access, and open education.
Eric Raymond’s defining essay, “The Magic Cauldron” was written in 1999 and 2000 as the theoretical base of how companies could capitalize on open-source and open-content products and services to produce a profit. In 2014, almost 15 years later, a blogging conversation ensued between three CEOs and one researcher. Each CEO was using different business OER models and hoping for wide scale adoption of their materials. In essence, their conversation was trying to see who was right about the market and which model would succeed best. This is a pivotal conversation in the education community because it is connected to the question of how the education community accepts open education resources. Why should they? What motivates them to adopt OER materials? How do they? How can companies create sustainable innovation in this sector?
A number of university departments, colleges and institutes in the US and elsewhere offer high quality educational opportunities and perform research in the areas of parapsychology, spirituality, transpersonal and consciousness studies. Below is a growing list of these from around the world. If you are aware of others, especially outside the US, please contact us. Also see the Parapsychological Associations's University Education in Parapsychology.
Early this week I attending the ALT Open Scotland meeting at the University of Edinburgh. It was a really though provoking day with a great range of speakers from government, FE, HE and the school sectors.
With students, designing the future of the education system. A fundamental action towards a shift to a participatory, inclusive knowledge society. This post describes the structure and methodology of our action.
This post is part of Hire Education, an occasional series about technological innovation in education and how it's reshaping the way students prepare themselves for a transformed workforce.
The Global Education Conference is a collaborative, inclusive, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to significantly increase opportunities for connecting classrooms while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity and educational access for all. Last year’s conference featured 400 general sessions and 20 keynote addresses from all over the world with over 13,000 participant logins. Click here for more information.
One of the most interesting presentation I heard at the recent EADTU Conference in Paris was Variable cost minimisation (VCM) business models in higher education by Yoram Kalman of the Open University Israel.
An educator's guide to open educational resources (OER), including online repositories, curriculum-sharing websites, sources for lesson plans and activities, and open textbooks.
The vast majority of people in the industrial world, and now a majority of the world's peoples altogether, live in or near large cities. Some are mega-cities, caused by crises and a source of suffering. Under any rational order, they would not exist . Others are treasures, centers of culture and learning. Most are somewhere in between. In any case, they are the locus of politics and the struggle for change. All matter relation to them, from urban design to community organizing, will be the focus of this department.
Open education has been dominated by magic, a belief that somehow high quality education can be delivered at no cost to billions around the world. It is time to get serious about business models that will allow the creation and maintenance of open schools., colleges, universities, on-line courses, and educational materials at affordable prices. Representatives from Open Doors Group, De Anza College, Open Assembly, Florida Virtual Campus, and COT Education will host a lively interactive session on this topic.
GNUniversity is a Free Libre and Open Source Remote Education System designed for Empowerment of Workers, Unionists and Union Organisers via Study-Circles, Self-training, exchange and strategy sessions, as well as high qulaity licence, masters, and doctorate level free access programs delivered online using Floss platfoms like Big Blue Button, Meet.Jitsi,Talky and others.
This five-module introductory course by +Acumen shares how Acumen analyzes social impact of their portfolio companies and that same building blocks can be applied to any socially-focused company or organization that the learners are excited about.
This is a critical examination of the claims that innovations such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) will disrupt the business models of the higher education sector. It describes what business models are, analyses the business model of free MOOCs offered by traditional universities and compares that model to that of paid online courses offered by distance teaching universities. The results of the analysis suggest that, in their present form, MOOCs are unlikely to address the challenge of reaching and assisting students from disadvantaged backgrounds and in developing countries. Nevertheless, MOOCs and the buzz surrounding them do signal a threat to the higher education sector, namely the widening gap between the skills of graduates of the educational system and the societal expectations from them.
As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor while expanding the ranks of their managerial class. Modeled after a savage neoliberal value system in which wealth and power are redistributed upward, a market-oriented class of managers largely has taken over the governing structures of most institutions of higher education in the United States. As Debra Leigh Scott points out, "administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country."1 There is more at stake here than metrics. Benjamin Ginsberg views this shift in governance as the rise of what he calls ominously the "the all administrative university," noting that it does not bode well for any notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere.2
For several years, the importance of continuous education has been stressed by several governmental and non-governmental institutions (Janssen & Schuwer, 2012; Marshall & Casserly, 2006). Education is seen as important both for personal growth and empowerment for one’s personal wellbeing and for developing the professional capabilities needed in today’s society. In his 2011 State of the Union address President Obama put emphasis on the government’s ambitions to “out-innovate and out-educate” the rest of the world. Almost at the same time, at the Davos World Economic Forum (2011), the urgency of appropriate education was stressed, observing that the current lack of adequately educated people hinders prosperity and economic growth in the near future. The OECD is preparing a proposal to translate these intentions into a concrete policy.
Education is being hacked. Through free online courses, peer-to-peer learning, apprenticeships, skillshares and more, the doors of global accessibility are being blown wide open.
Just before MozFest a group of us got together to start building the Open Education Timeline. There was lots of post-it notes involved and over 100 ideas/events collected.
Each year, more and more Korean universities make entries into the world’s top 100 ranking chart, indicating that they offer better educational programs.
MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses. Although there has been access to free online courses on the Internet for years, the quality and quantity of courses has changed. Access to free courses has allowed students to obtain a level of education that many only could dream of in the past. This has changed the face of education. In The New York Times article Instruction for Masses Knocked Down Campus Walls, author Tamar Lewin stated, “in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree.”
Unfortunately, not everyone has access to the scholarly literature, despite advances in communications technology. The high cost of academic journals restricts access to knowledge; in some fields, prices can reach $20,000 for a single journal subscription1 or $30 for an individual article.2 Despite these high prices, authors of scholarly articles are not paid for their work. The profits from these publications go solely to the publishers of the journals. A vast amount of research is funded from public sources – yet taxpayers are locked out by the cost of access.
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