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- Week 6 (Final Week): List of Presentations -- please update with suggestions Mon, 2011-03-14 01:18
- Final Week Survey: Help Improve Find, Author, Share -- please respond to the following questions Fri, 2011-03-11 06:21
- Tools, Resources, and Events Thu, 2011-03-10 09:09
- Project on critical thinking OER Wed, 2011-03-09 20:39
- You can conceive it...but then what? Wed, 2011-03-09 20:33
Hi- I'm Nancy Boyle. I have been a classroom teacher for nearly two decades and am the 21c curriculum coordinator at Cushing Academy in central MA. We have been a laptop school for nearly 10 years, and we use various other devices, as well. We are transitioning to more etexts, open content and such at our school, but are doing so in pockets. We'd like to move towards a more unified understanding and adoption of digital content. We have a school platform with a classpage for each section of a course, and a digital library page which is ever evolving; at times it seems these are conflicting in purpose and confusing for students and faculty(which should I use?) Many teachers here have had websites for awhile now, some use ning, or blog, or use facebook. Some use digital copies of published texts, others gather resources (primary, or that they've authored), and some prefer the big backpack approach. There are so many ways to go and so many opinions, that I am hoping to gain a deeper understanding to guide our faculty. I teach English and linguistics, so it is easy for me to use e-readers and online sources and have been "flat" for 2 years. Overwhelmingly, learners in my classes prefer digital content and have helped find and create resources. I'd like to create a linguistics text (or modules) this year and use the experience to help others at our school who want to go digital.
Hi I am Josh Peterson. I have been a full time student most of my life. I have also had the chance to teach a course at a university, technical school, and for industry. While teaching at the technical school and industry I had to prepare lectures without relying on a textbook because it cost to much.
If the students had a good textbook that was free or cheap I know the class would be so much better. Also as I student there are textbooks that would have been great for my classes but the publishers of the books no longer printed the textbooks and it was illegal to photocopy them. With open source textbooks, the books can always be printed legally. These are two of the reasons I am interested in the open source textbook
For my project I want to work on improving a current open source textbook that I have been working on about radioactive waste, if this is okay for the class.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Radioactive_Waste_Management
Since 2008, I have been the Director of the Writing Initiative at Passaic County Community College in New Jersey USA. For 7 years prior to that, I was the Manager of Instructional Technology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). I am an adjunct instructor at both PCCC and NJIT. I have also taught English, writing, film and video in secondary education before working in higher education.
I have used open texts the past year and I am an advocate/trainer trying to spread the word into New Jersey. I have collected some information that I use in workshops at http://pccc.libguides.com/etextbooks
If there's room in this course, I'd like to join in to learn more about the authoring of open textbooks and OER. At NJIT, I launched their instance of iTunes U (one of the first 16 schools) http://itunes.njit.edu/ and helped launch their open courseware initiative http://ocw.njit.edu/
I'm currently teaching courses in critical thinking and social media and haven't found any open textbooks for them. I'm not sure I'm up to authoring a textbook, but I am interested in the process.
Hello. I'm Lisa Jackson. Until just a couple of weeks ago, I taught (primarily online) at Henderson Community College, a college in the Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS). I also was the Distance Learning Coordinator. In Jan, I moved to the systems office to continue working in eLearning, just from a different perspective.
The use of open textbooks, especially in DIstance Learning, is of great interest to KCTCS. I'm enrolled to learn more about the process and this class in my introduction to the topic.
I don't have any ideas for a project!
Lisa
Hi Lisa:
As a distance learning professional and also as part of a community and technical college system (like myself), perhaps you would like to team with me on my project. I plan to author online open-access professional development resources for faculty. Our faculty are, like most, very busy. They find it almost impossible to be able to attend my f2f professional development offerings, and I have found this is true of most faculty in our state system of community and technical colleges. I have just started to create self-paced, self-directed online workshops as an alternative for these folks. I have enrolled in this course to learn how to do it even better, locate more open-access resources I can incorporate into my workshops, and learn how to better make these available to college faculty everywhere - perhaps even in Kentucky :)
Kelley
That would be great...and sounds interesting. Is there much info/PD available online?
Hi Again Lisa:
I am working as an instructional designer at a technical college. Most of our instructors have never had formal training as instructors - they come to us as experts in whatever profession for which they will be teaching. Because of this, I try to offer a balance of general education training: curriculum development, learning outcomes, assessment, syllabus development etc; with more specialized technology training in the use of our LMS, interactive tools, educational applications, and others.
In the topics of curriculum and its components, I do find some open-access content; however, most often I find myself having to contact authors and gain use permission. Multi-media and interactive content seems even harder to find, but there is some out there.
What I think will be most valuable to me, will be the interactions with faculty and other education professionals in this workshop. Each of you will make contributions in this workshop that I know will be very valuable to me. Just new sources of great content will be greatly appreciated and worth my time investment.
Kelley
Hello Everybody:
I am Kelley, and I have, amongst a great many other things in my already long life, been on online community college instructor for the past 11 years and am currently also working as an instructional designer for a technical college - both here in Washington state.
I am a dedicated advocate for both open access textbooks, and open educational resources. In fact, I hope to eventually author an open-access Medical Terminology textbook.
For this course, though, I am greatly interested in authoring online, self-paced, faculty professional development resources. I have already created several, but wish to do more. I also wish to do them as best as they can be done, and explore opportunities to make these readily available to faculty everywhere.
I am looking forward to getting to know each of you,
Kelley L. Meeusen
Hello,
My name is Pat Lockley and I work at present for the University of Nottingham. I am also helping out on some of the post drumbeat Mozilla attribution work for attributing cc licensed materials.
I helped to build http://www.Nottingham.ac.uk/xpert which is a large search engine for learning resources, some of which are OER.
For the project, I'd liketo look into making an open book search tool, and possibly tools to help people develop open books.
Looking forward to the course and meeting everyone too. Xpert is a useful resource and if any one has any questions about it, or ocw / oer feel free to get in touch.
Hello,
My name is Martha Wolfe, and I am a biology professor at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College in Kentucky. I have some experience with online courses, developing and teaching. My real interest is to look into the possibility of a nonmajors biology text...? So far I haven't seen anyone interested specifically in this. If not, my second choice could be Pat's idea of an open book search tool...
Hi Martha,
Happy to try to build a search tool
Pat
Faculty often ask me if there is one place they can go and see ALL the open textbooks. There is no such place but centralized repositories would be great - and a search tool that queried the main ones would be the best alternative.
Shall we start making a list of sites - I am happy to try this as a project - sorry for delay - very busy :(
Hi all,
My name is Susan Amper, and I teach English at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. I am interested in researching open resources for our English classes. One thought I had was a handbook along the lines of Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference, only much shorter. That book retails for about $65 and there is little to no copyrighted material.
The college is in one of the poorest areas of the Bronx, and anything along these lines that I can do to help lower the cost of college for our students would be great.
I have been an open textbook reviewer and advocate but have had little time to sort through all the open resources.
Greetings everyone!
My name is Erich Smith and I have been teaching in the adult education field for about 15 years and serve as the digital initiative program manager for a local non-profit. Currently, I am developing (in addition to teaching) a "Blended" learning class/classroom.
My goal(s) for this class center around development of an Open Textbook Library (of sorts) for educators in the field. With resources being so tight for both adult education programs and their students, Open Textbooks could become a major resource in many ways.
My quest for this course is to find and catalog related materials into a del.icio.us library. Additionally, I would love to hear and learn more about the authoring of open textbooks and OER.
Greetings everyone!
My name is Jane Knight and I am looking forward to this course very much. I teach at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My area of research is the internationalization of higher education. For my project I would like to work with some African Colleagues and others to develop a course handbook for a new Masters program on Comparative and International Higher Education being developed at a University in South Africa.
This is an ambitous project for someone who has no experience at all in OER but I have to start somewhere because I believe that OER has an important contribution to the internationalization of higher education and thus want to demonstrate its role by preparing an OER textbook.
Looking forward to sharing this course with all of you.
Jane
Hi Jane – It’s great to hear your interest in Africa. I think Africa needs OER more than anybody else. If textbooks are expensive for westerners, imagine how difficult it is for people in Sub-sahara countries! I am curious of how your project will turn out and how I can help. Please consider me if I can be of any help.
...Claver
Hi Claver-- Good to hear from you. It would be great to work together on this project if you are interested. I have to tell you I am a complete novice at OER as I have not had any hands on experience at all. However, there is a great opportunity to prepare some course textbook or handbook for a new MEd program being developed on International and Comparative Higher Education. There is also the African Network for the Internationalization of Education which is in the process of establishing a virtual resource exchange forum called AFIRE. Have a look at http://www.anienetwork.org/ for more information about ANIE. I believe that one or two African colleagues will join the course and it would be great if we could all work together and at least start the process of creating an OER text book on Internationalization of HIgher Education in Africa. The MA program will involve a Pan Africa cohort of students who are HE professionals or academics interested in the international and regional dimension of HE in Africa. How experienced are you with OER? Thanks again for being in touch. Jane
Jane,
I have about a full year experience with the concept of OER. I continue to watch faculty in our college system develop open courses, I have witnessed and helped some faculty publish course handouts on web sites, and I organized and delivered OER workshops. I understand the philosophy behind OER licensing through Creative Commons, etc. But, I must admit that I still have much to learn about how to get quality content in open repositories and meeting standards of UDL and Quality Matters. My educational background includes human computer interaction, and curriculum and instructional technology. Web development is also something I enjoy very much and have considerable expertise in. Jane, I am confident together we can have something significant accomplished. I visited ANIE website, and saw your PPT slides, well done! By the way, I am a native of central east Africa which may justify my additional interest in your project.
...Claver
Hi Claver - Thanks for your message. It would be great to work with you on this project but I am a complete novice on OER. I have tried to get my two African Colleagues to register and even though they say that they have I have not seen their intro's yet. One is the executive director of ANIE and the other is a prof at UP in Pretoria. They are as "green" as I am about OER but are keen. Have you seen the new Africa Portal at www.africaportal.org. I am looking forward to working with you on this project. Do we always communcate through this forum or should we also exchange email addresses to work together on our subproject. JAne
Hi Jane,
Sorry for a late response. Last weekend I was out of town for 3 days. Here is my email: chategekimana@wvc.edu . Did you get a hold of your colleagues? It will be helpful if you can send a short description of the project and what you would like me to help with, what is the time frame? Any specific info you can share will be helpful. Thanks.
...Claver
Hi there Jane,
I wanted to volunteer to join you on this project. I am very fascinated by Africa..and as a point of personal history, was inspired to start my network of blogs by Zimbabwe and the continued calamity it faces
:-)
Mike
Greetings - I am Claver Hategekimana, Teaching and Learning Coordinator at Wenatchee Valley College in Washington. Through several open educational resources initiatives going on in the state of Washington, I had a chance to addend OER workshops. I am also actively promoting OER at my college. I support a peer to peer learning group that is exploring OER at our college. At the same time, I acknowledge that I need to familiarize myself with what is out there in terms of OER repositories, effective techniques to find quality open resources, authoring tools, and publishing process. For example, in Fall 2010, one of our faculty was not impressed with the complexity of getting his book in open repositories. After many attempts with little success, he almost gave up. I feel that as an instruction support person, I have obligation to learn about those technical things about OER system to better help my colleagues. Another example of a project I would like to be involved in is to incorporate best practices of universal design in open content; and how to test that existing content meet the standards.
...Claver
Hi Claver:
Its good to see another Washitonian in the course. I am the instructional Designer at Clover Park Technical College in Lakewood. I share and agree with much of what you have stated in your intro - I need to improve my own open-access skills so that I can better help my faculty.
I also am a big follower/supporter/advocate of UDL and online accessibility. In fact, I have several accessibility issues with this classroom - I cannot read the pale yellow text on the gray background. Its abominable!
Welcome aboard.
Kelley
Nice to see you on here Kelley – this course will be fun!
...Claver
Una:
I have got to complain about the color theme for this eclassroom - I cannot read the pale yellow text on the gray background. This is especially bad on the Course Materials page. I cannot be the only one with this accessibility issue.
Kelley
Hi Kelley,
This is the response I got from one of the P2PU administrators, Jessica. Let me know if this helps or not.
"I know you can change CSS with browser plugins and turn off style with them
as well. One of my favorite ways to manipulate what is shown is
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ [3]
Depending on his browser, he can also set it there too. In Firefox, under
Tools -> Options -> Content click advanced, and uncheck 'Allow pages to
choose their own' and it should be the browser default. He can make that be
whatever he would like. He'll need to switch back to 'Allow' if he wants
other sites to show their styling."
Una
Thanks, Kelley, for the feedback on the classroom font issue. I am contacting the P2PU administrators and hope to hear back soon about how we can change that. I am assuming that white on a black background would be easier for you to read.
Hello all,
I'm afraid I'm doing all this incorrectly. I think I've introduced myself in the wrong place--but forgive me: I promise to catch up. I'm an English teacher; I'm the director of our writing project site; I'm the director of the newest masters in English--well our only masters in English--and the focus is critical literacy--how the way we read, write, and communicate verbally is changing. What you don't see on this introduction is any techie expertise. That's because I don't have any, and I want the textbooks for our courses to be multi-media strong, able to adapt to the changes that happen as they happen instead of five years later. I need help in making my idea a reality.
Peg Ellington
Hi Peg, and welcome aboard.
The very first thing a person needs to be a techie is the willingness to try. The second thing is the confidence to act on that willingness.
Guess what? You are on the road to becoming a techie. Yes, you are in the correct spot for posting your introduction, and you accomplished it just fine.
I work with non-techie faculty everyday, and I always tell them, "Do not be afraid! You can seldom break anything beyond repair." In the example of this classroom - you truly cannot break anything no matter how hard you try, so try everything. Click on anything that can be clicked on, read everything that can be read, open every nook and cranny and explore this new classroom.
One last bit of advice - have fun.
Kelley
Hi Peg,
I too am an English teacher, and your project looks intriguing. Perhaps we can work together on it.
Susan Amper
Peg - don't worry about writing in the right place, just continue sharing your great ideas!!
Hi there everyone,
My name is Mike Pouraryan and I am also quite excited to be part of this experience starting on Thursday. It should be quite an adventure. I have been part of the OpexText Book Project for quite some time...worked on a number of initiatives and ended up adopting a number of the books I reviewed as supplemental material for the courses I teach.
As I got caught up on the Virtual "conversations" with colleagues from all around the world, I am just amazed as to how truly we live in a global village. I was intrigued by Softchalk...I am glad to see they have a trial period..the problem, though, is that I am not in the mood for paying anything... :-) Is there an alternative, potentially, in the open source movement that anyone is aware of?
As I conclude , I wanted to wish everyone the very best as we embark on this adventure...it should be a fun one indeed!!!
Hi Mike, good question. There are some more affordable alternatives (thanks to Judy Baker, our executive director for this list) but you will need to check them out. Softchalk has a good reputation for producing accessible curriculum which is key in higher education. More discussion coming in Week 4.
Glomaker
http://www.glomaker.org/index.html
Udutu
http://www.udutu.com/index.html
Hot Potatoes
http://hotpot.uvic.ca/
EXE Learning
http://exelearning.org/wiki
LAMS
http://www.lamsfoundation.org/
Quandry - HalfBaked
http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com/quandary.php
Ultilium
http://utilium.com/
thank you for this.
I will be working to analyze this and potentially take this up as a project too..in addition to having spoken up to "hopefully" be accepted to work on the project for Africa that my distinguished colleague wants to work on.
:-)
Mikke
I helped to write some of xerte - www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte
Happy to give people pointers with it - it's simple to use and a lot more powerful than the products listed there.
it's also free, and open source.
Hi everyone!
I'm interested in finding out more about opentextbook for Macro and Micro economics for community college and am willing to author one if the need be, but am not sure how the process works.....thus, I hope this workshop will point me in the right direction. For a start, I'lll be interested in joining the 'researching aspects of open educational resourse use'.
Kelly - I've tried to use SoftChalk, but they do not allow tables to be copied and pasted from MS Word, true?....thereafter, I'm not using anymore...
Sunita :)
Sunita:
I have been using Softchalk since version 5.0 and frequently copy tables from Word. The results are often not as pretty as I would like but they work. Then, using Softchalk's own table functions, I am able to modify the tables pasted from Word, including attributing styles.
Kelley
Hello All!
My name is Matt MacLaughlin and I am a Branch Chief in the Federal Government for a Technology Integration Branch. In my downtime I also teach English at local Community Colleges. In both cases, textbooks and providing information to the students in varied ways is almost non-existant. From the Federal side, most of the text type books and manuals are created by contractors and locked down for release under certain stipulations or, as on the Community College side, you are to stick to the same formulaic tomes because the person before you used those texts and found them to be great.
In this class I am looking to kind of open the world for the students I teach or develop for. I would like to find new and exciting ways to create manuals as well as find resources that I can use in both sides of my professional life.
For my project I would like to create some sort of logistics handbook for the Federal government. Everyone automatically thinks Transportation when logistics is mentioned, but it also incorporates supply and maintenance as well. While the Federal government has probably paid millions of dollars into manuals on each subject i would like to create a great, all inclusive manual that meets the needs of all logistics customers. I know, it sounds boring, but I think it's needed:)
As a Branch Chief in Technology Integration I have all modes of dispersal at my fingertips mobile, learning content management systems (ex. Blackboard), etc. My hope is that once I create this valuable resource I can patch it out in various formats.
Hi Matt:
Its nice to see someone in the group who is at least partially not from an educational institution.
I have a question: It is my understanding that new federal law prescribes that all documents produced with federal dollars must be open-access (barring security and privacy protected works, of course). In fact, I think I got this from an open-access work-shop I attended. Is this not true, not in effect yet, not grandfathered for previously created works, or what? I ask because huge amounts of documents and information are created using federal dollars and this move could be very supportive of the open-access movement.
However, I spent almost 20 years working in the regulatory environment (health care), and do understand how almost globally encompassing the exceptions to rules and regulations can be.
Hope you can clarify this for me.
Kelley
Hi Kelly:
just to chime in with what I know. The US is actually quite unique (there are other cases, but far too few) in that all material published by the federal government is in the Public Domain - not covered by any copyright limitation (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._govern...). This includes information from NASA, maps, databases, etc. It is very different in Canada and England, for example, which use "Crown Copyright".
However, the fact that it is not copyright, doesn't mean that the agencies have an obligation to share the files with others, or in usable formats (only that once you have those files, you can do what you want with them). Public.Resource.org has done great work in trying to "free" some of these resources: http://public.resource.org/
The last part is for scientists funded with public money. Traditionally this requirement has not included them, but it is changing - the NIH mandate a few years ago was a huge move (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/) and resulted in more than 65,000 articles a year being made open access. What is happening now is that they are trying to expand this to other federal funding bodies, etc, which is great.
Stian:
Thanks for the great info. Really appreciate it.
Kelley
Kelley,
Good question. FOr the most part I believe that if the government funds it, it is by nature open sourced. However I have found some loopholes as when even if there is a federal government stamp on the book, if money has been paid to a contractor for the compilation or information within a book, there are certain things you can and cannot do to it -- ex. mine info from it to create another federal text, etc. Now is this a case of a badly written contract? possibly, but I have to think that contractors keep their own interests in mind when they work too. Hope this helps a bit.
Matt
Hi everyone,
My name is Carina Bossu and I am a research fellow with DEHub (Distance Education Hub) - a research centre at the University of New England, Australia. I'm at the early stages of a research project that will investigate the adoption and use of OERs in Australia, most importantly the impact of current institutional and national policies for this adoption. I can see that I have lots to learn from my colleagues in this course. I hope also to make contributions to the discussions as I process with my research.
Jane, I conducted a study about higher education policies in Brazil in 2009 (the study seems still updated), but it was mostly focused on distance education policies. I’m more than happy to share it with you, your team and everybody else here. In fact, I’m going to try to make it an OER under a Creative Commons license. I know this study is not about African HE, but could give you some insights from another developing part of the world.
Kelley, I am also an advocate for both open educational resources and open source. I use WikiEducator and WikiResearcher to make some my resources available. But, I also understand that they do not have such a user-friendly interface. Can I join your project group and learn from you about how to raise awareness and assist faculty members in adopting OERs? I’m researching the policies (and they are important too), but there will be the need to have a more practical approach to the adoption of OERs here at my university (eventually) and I’d like to be prepared to help the staff!
Cheers,
Carina
Hi Carina,
Wonderful to hear about your research in OER. College Open Textbooks has just completed a round of research with our Collaborative partner, ISKME, on faculty and student attitudes towards open textbooks and open educational resources. We have some presentations that I would be happy to share -- unfortunately and ironically the upcoming journal article appearing in the Open Learning journal is not free.
Speaking of Brazil, I have recently hear Carolina Rossini speak about government policies in Brazil that are helping to support the use of OER there, as well. Perhaps your paths have crossed.
Carina and All: Please join our "open and free" Community of Practice to hear about more upcoming events and also to join the Researchers group there. There are some great OER research resources up there.
http://collegeopentextbooks.ning.com
Thanks for this Una! I don't know Carolina personally, but I do know some of her work.
Carina
Hi Carina;
First, in support of your existing research our State Board of Community and Technical Colleges' (SBCTC) Director of Technology is Cable Green. Cable is a nationally (USA) recognized voice in OER and the driving force behind our state system's OER iniative. He can be contacted at cgreen@sbctc.edu He loves to talk OER and could be a good resource for you.
Second: I would love to have you join our team. Una told me this morning that you we interested. I had not settled on a suitable professional development topic, although OER works for me, and thought you, Lisa and myself could talk this over.
Kelley
Hi Kelley,
Thank you very much for sending me Cable's email! I’ll definitely contact him – as soon as I’m ready! I’m still at the early stages of the research and I’d like to have my ideas better organised before talking to him!
I’m more than happy to have a Skype meeting or discuss our project with you and Lisa via emails. My personal email is carina.bossu@gmal.com
Any professional development topic would be fine with me – I’m afraid I have more to learn than to contribute, both to PD and to the development of OERs ☺
Part of my PhD studies was on staff development for distance and higher education in Brazil, but unfortunately, I have no practical experiences. Now, I’m again researching policies for OERs, but haven’t developed anything yet. It’s time for me to have a practical approach to my research!
After all this, I still hope you accept me in your group??!! ☺
Cheers,
Carina
In addition to creating the strong foundation and the opportunity to collaborate, I hope to be able to eventually truly strengthen my knowledge base as an Open Source Evangelist--the possiblities are truly limitless especially as we're faced with truly having to learn to do more with less...
I am teaching a critical thinking course this semester for the first time and was unable to find any open textbook suitable for use. Actually, I was even unable to find OER that could be packaged to serve as a "textbook."
So, there's a need for something - but the task of writing a textbook is beyond my capabilities and available time now. I would still like to collect materials to create "something" (beyond a website with lots of links, which I could do easily) to use in the fall.
Does anyone have a) alternative approaches b) an interest in working on a CT OER?
Kenneth:
Here are a couple that I have found:
PodBlack Cat: http://podblack.com/research/skeptic-education/
Ask a Teacher - Critical Thinking Archive: http://askatechteacher.wordpress.com/category/critical-thinking/
eBest ICT Cluster - Critical Thinking Resources: http://centre4.core-ed.net/modules/folder/folder.php?space_key=13303&mod...
And finaly a textbook from Wikibook, "Effective Reasoning": http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Effective_Reasoning
Kelley
Hi everyone! Sorry for the late posting but I am also involved with some online workshops for a grant I'm working on. I teach at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, NY in the Cooperative Education Department. We focus on career development/exploration and internship placement. Have used a number of texts over the years but always supplement. Thought it would be a great idea to combine OER resources instead of a textbook. Have used a chapter or two from Flat World Knowledge regarding personality types in the past but would like to find other resources. Really need more time and a way to convince others that OER would be an acceptable option in my department.
For a project, I would be interested in putting together an alternative "textbook" to cover the career development/exploration/internship preparation material I need. Would be great to have it all in one place and easy to update.
Hi Susan,
Good to hear from you -- I was just talking with a few of your amazing colleagues this week at the AACU in San Francisco, Bret Enyon, and Elizabeth Clark, during the ePortfolio session. I think this is an excellent area (Career/Internship/Exploration) for an open textbook or open course. You may want to check out this list of books.
http://collegeopentextbooks.org/open-textbook-content/open-textbooks-by-...
These are books about career communication skills and making presentations. There is a need for comprehensive open textbooks on the areas that you mention and this would be a great project.
Best,
Una
I have worked with Bret and Liz for many years since my department's classes were the primary feeders for new ePortfolios. I also teach a Portfolio Development course targeting Prior Learning. I look forward to checking out the link you posted - right now I keep getting an error.
Apologies for the bad link. I have shortened it and this should work. http://bit.ly/epjd6O
Would love to hear more about your Prior Learning portfolios sometime -- do you have a link to a site or write up that you could share?
Thanks for the updated link, it works. I have used selected chapters from Flat World Knowledge but will check out the new resources. Here's the link to the Prior Learning website at LaGuardia: http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/cpl/index.htm
Hi Everyone,
We've got a really wonderful group of folks joining us in this course. We have secondary level, college, university, federal government educators, directors, and tool developers.
So far we have 3 teams identified developing open educational resources for:
Internationalization of Higher Education in Africa
Profession Development for Faculty
Masters Degree in Critical Literacy
We still have about half of our members without an assigned project. I see an opportunity for secondary level teachers to team up on an open textbook project and for college level instructors as well and finally a project around OER tools and repositories. Here is what I heard from you regarding interests:
High School: OER in Panama, Open Textbooks (particularly Linguistics) in College Prep, Open Textbooks for virtual laptops in African high schools, and OER in Phillipines.
College: Adobe Training, Accounting, Adult Education, Biology, Career Development, Critical Thinking, Economics, Logistics, Multi-media formats, Nuclear Engineering.
I look forward to hearing about your team formations. Please feel free to post here or create a discussion forum.
Best,
Una