Stephen Downes Reflects Open Education Projects and Potential

Via Stephen Downes
Stephen Downes talk at the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario, Richmond Hill, Ontario:

Open Education: Projects and Potential

View more documents from Stephen Downes.

“The internet offers society the opportunity to provide access to a free or affordable education for all. This concept is known as ‘open education‘ and is the subject of various projects, such as ‘Open Education Resources’ (OER) or the Open Courseware Project (OCW). This talk looks at the principle of open education, major projects, and reflects the role played by educational technology, and outlines some of the challenges.”

The best thing now, is to stop writing, explore the slides, click play (audio), listen, learn, reflect, unlearn, reflect again….Enjoy 🙂

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IRRODL- Openness and the Future of Higher Education

IRRODL – Openness and the Future of Higher Education

Here are the articles from this special issue:

Editorial

• Openness and the Future of Higher Education
  David Wiley, John Hilton III

Research Articles

• Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
  David Wiley, John Hilton III
• From Open Content to Open Course Models: Increasing Access and Enabling Global Participation in Higher Education
  Tannis Morgan, Stephen Carey
• The Impact of Openness on Bridging Educational Digital Divides
  Andy Lane
• Open Textbook Proof-of-Concept via Connexions
  Judy Baker, Joel Thierstein, Kathi Fletcher, Manpreet Kaur, Jonathan Emmons
• Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education
  Jan Philipp Schmidt, Christine Geith, Stian Håklev, Joel Thierstein
• Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability
  Norm Friesen
• The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Course Tools
  Antonio Fini
• Incentives and Disincentives for the Use of OpenCourseWare
  Anne M. Arendt, Brett E. Shelton

If you don’t believe in Open Educational Resources (OER), OpenCourseWare (OCW), and openness, perhaps these articles above will change your views about that.

The future of higher education and openness?

No clue, except that we can learn:

• Whatever We want
• Whenever We want
• Wherever We want
• On any device We want

Yes, most of it will not cost anything except our time. Our time is precious, so if it ain’t of quality, forget it. That applies to any programme or course, too. Yes, increasingly the public will be enlightened, so we better wake up to a new world order of learning beyond any classroom wall 🙂

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Thousands of Free Online Courses!

Free Online Courses

It includes thousands of links to courses in subjects ranging from architecture to chemistry to women’s studies and these courses are prepared by top institutions such as MIT, Yale University and University of California.

It is a comprehensive and wonderful index (and list) of free courses, but I would also love to see a customized search feature that enables me to search all the University courses found here. One could easily use Google Custom Search (or any other free search creating engine you can find!) to do the trick.

Finally, one might want to also check out ZaidLearn’s ultimate OER – OCW lists of lists. It is an old and clumsy list, but still quite popular 🙂

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