Open Educational Resources and MOOC’s: Shifting Trends in Higher Education

I will be presenting and facilitating a discussion on Open Educational Resources and MOOC'S at SUNY Plattsburgh's annual Center for Teaching Excellence conference on teaching and learning, Saturday April 27th. 

The session is titled: Open Educational Resources and MOOC’s: Shifting Trends in Higher Education
The presentation can be viewed below, followed by additional resources for the participants. 

Open Educational Resources

To learn more about Open Educational Resources

OER101: Locating, Creating, Licensing, and Using OER https://opensuny.coursesites.com/
This is an open enrollment “course” created for SUNY faculty and staff. It has drawn people from all over the world. To date over 700 people have enrolled. Think of it as a resource more than a course. There is no start or end date.

OER Handbook on WikiEducator http://wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator_version_one/Find

To learn more about Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/

Some places to find and/or store OER 

Always double check the licensing terms! Often they are found with the resource or in the terms of use section of the website

• OER Commons http://www.oercommons.org
• Connexions http://cnx.org/
• MERLOT http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
• Khan Academy https://www.khanacademy.org/
• Saylor Foundation http://www.saylor.org/
• The OrangeGrove http://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/access/home.do
• Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/
• OpenDOAR: The Directory of Open Access Repositories http://www.opendoar.org/

A rubric to help you evaluate OER http://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?code=L9WC6X&sp=yes

MOOC - Massive Open Online Course

Creating an Open Course
Listen to this Google Hangout with Carol Yeager and Betty Hurley-Dasgupta from Empire State College as they discuss their experiences with developing and offering c-MOOCs. They begin with an explanation of different types of MOOC’s.
http://youtu.be/a2pCl1Urjng

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK11)
This link is to the 2011 version of the first c-MOOC by Siemens and Downes. There are many links to readings on Connectivism. http://cck11.mooc.ca/week1.htm

DS106- Digital Storytelling
This is one of the most popular MOOC’s that has spurred a large community of practice. Project oriented course. http://ds106.us/

This article discusses the pedagogical differences between c-MOOC’s and x-MOOC’s
Rodriguez, C.O. (2012). MOOCs and the AI-Stanford like Courses: Two Successful and Distinct Course Formats for Massive Open Online Courses. European Journal of Open, Distance, and E-Learning. Retrieved from  http://www.eurodl.org/?article=516

MOOC’s and the Quality Question by Ronald Legon, Executive Director of Quality Matters
This article focuses on x-MOOC’s
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/04/25/moocs-do-not-represent-best-online-learning-essay

x-MOOC Providers
Coursera https://www.coursera.org/
Udacity https://www.udacity.com/
edX  https://www.edx.org/

Locating, Creating, Licensing and Utilizing OERs (OER-101)

For the last 4-5 months I have been collaborating with amazing people from Buffalo State College, SUNY Oswego, and Empire State on an open course to be used as professional development SUNY wide and beyond on OER. The course is open now for registration, but goes live with all content tomorrow, 1/23/13. I am extremely excited about this course. It is being marketed as a MOOC, but we are calling it a community course after a model implemented by Philyse Banner at American Public University. In this model building communities of practice through community groups is encouraged. 

Anyone can sign up at https://opensuny.coursesites.com/

Follow us on twitter at #OER101

A MOOC and LOOC?

Today in my email I got my OLDaily newsletter from Stephen Downes. As always I gave it a quick scan to see what was being said in the world of open education today. It seems that often there is something about MOOC's. What they are or what they are not. How someone is experimenting with some version of what they think a MOOC is. Today it was about a LOOC. Yes that is right, instead of a Massive Open Online Course it is a Little Open Online Course. The University of Maine is experimenting with opening up some courses for free to between 2 and 7 students. These students will be treated as any other student in the class with the same expectations and opportunities to complete assignments and exams if they wish. However, they will not receive credit for their work. They can decide to become a paying student before the normal add/drop period ends. You can read the full story by Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed. 

This is an open course? The course is open for a select few sure, but beyond those 2- 7 students, this is a closed course (on Blackboard) that some people are given user names and passwords for and able to take for free. So this is a free course for a select few, but not really open.Take a look. http://www.umpi.edu/academic-resources/umpi-openu/how-it-works

So it is not really open and it certainly is not anything closely related to what a MOOC really is. It is closer to the idea of auditing a course. Are these courses using the idea of knowledge being shared? Is it distributed, networked, social, participatory? No, it seems that the focus of what a MOOC is has been on their size and not the change in how people learn. That to me is the most troublesome. So the question I am left with is what impact, if any, do MOOC's really have on higher education and adult learning? Are we learning anything about how people learn from them or simply twisting them and turning them into things like a "LOOC"?

Open Content Licensing for Educators

Today is day 1 of the Open Content Licensing for Educators course in Wikieducator. I was on the fence with taking this one because I thought I learned a great deal about licensing in the Wiley course, but I could not help myself from wanting to be part of a course that has close to 500 participants from 62 countries! I will surely learn things I did not know and meet lots of people from all over the world at the same time. Go to http://wikieducator.org/Open_content_licensing_for_educators to take part.

OER Taskforce Presentations

It has been a little while since my last blog post on open learning because we have been very busy here with some exciting things!

Our taskforce has been working on sharing all of the wonderful things we have learned from taking the Openness in Education course. We first presented a poster at Empire State College's "All College Conference" back on March 28th on Open Education Resources. Then on April 28th, we gave a presentation titled "Lesson's Learned: An Experience in Open Education" at  Empire State College's Center for Distance Learning (CDL) Conference. We had a great time at this presentation and were able to share what we have learned with the college community. We even created a hands-on version of David Wiley's OER remix game for this audience. Most of the work for this version of the game should be created to Claire Miller, one of our Instructional Designers who has also been working on this taskforce.

We are taking this on the road now! You can see us next at SUNY CIT (Conference on Instruction and Technology) on Wednesday May 30th from 8:30-9:45 where several us will present "Open Education and a Study Group Approach to Understanding It". We will discuss our experience with the course, how we approached it as a team using face-to-face meetings, and what we learned about open education. We will also play our version of the game if time permits. We hope to have lively conversations!

As soon as we return from CIT Michele Ogle and myself will have a brief presentation at the Capital District Educational Technology Group meeting on open education and how we can use it in our science, math, and technology courses. Michele is an assistant area coordinator and math faculty member. We are working together on developing an online precalculus course this development cycle. This short presentation will mostly focus on those areas of open eduction that is most relevant for this group, such as where to find OER's, licensing, encouraging the creation and sharing of OER's, and challenges we have found along the way. 

I am also in the process of developing a WikiEducator page for our group where we will be sharing what we learned along with our poster, PowerPoint presentations, and links to documents for the game. As soon as it is complete I will post a link to it! 

 

OpenEd Overview Badge Completed

I have been having issues with my blog, so I am re-blogging  this to see if it shows up in the course feed.

This is my final post linking to the blogs I have completed for all 12 topics of the Introduction to Openness in Education course . I believe I have meet the requirement to earn the OpenEd Overview badge. I know that I have a much better understanding of everything open, which is critical for my role as coordinator of curriculum and instructional design at Empire State College. As I help with  revisions and new developments of our online science, math, and technology courses, I am now better informed to help our content experts and area coordinators navigate this new world. Education is on the verge of a huge paradigm shift, thank you for the opportunity to understand it better! 

Links to my blogs are below:

• Open Licensing
• Open Source
• Open Content
• OpenCourseWare
• Open Educational Resources
• Open Access
• Open Science
• Open Data
• Open Teaching
• Open Assessment
• Open Business Models
• Open Policy

These posts were originally done at http://commons.esc.edu/stone/ over the course of many months, but that site is having issues with linking/access. All posts have been moved over to this blogger site. I began this course January 25th and finished my last blog today, April 12th!

#ioe12 Done! OpenEd Overview Badge (Novice Level)

This is my final post linking to the blogs I have completed for all 12 topics of the Introduction to Openness in Education course . I believe I have meet the requirement to earn the OpenEd Overview badge. I know that I have a much better understanding of everything open, which is critical for my role as coordinator of curriculum and instructional design at Empire State College. As I help with  revisions and new developments of our online science, math, and technology courses, I am now better informed to help our content experts and area coordinators navigate this new world. Education is on the verge of a huge paradigm shift, thank you for the opportunity to understand it better!

The links to my blogs are below

• Open Licensing
• Open Source
• Open Content
• OpenCourseWare
• Open Educational Resources
• Open Access
• Open Science
• Open Data
• Open Teaching
• Open Assessment
• Open Business Models
• Open Policy

These posts were originally done at http://commons.esc.edu/stone/ over the course of many months, but that site is having issues. All posts have been moved over to this blogger site. I began this course January  25th and finished my last blog today, April 12th!