Here’s an exciting opportunity for the open education community. Susan D’Antoni, a long-time leader in Open Educational Resources (OER), is coordinating an important effort to map the global OER space.

You can join the list by sending an email to: oer-community-request@athabascau.ca and typing “subscribe” in the subject line. I have signed up to contribute. I hope you will too.

Read the complete announcement below for more information.

 

Dear Colleagues,

The following invitation is extended to any of you who might be interested in a discussion of how the OER community at large might design, create and sustain an OER world map of institutional initiatives – to help us connect and communicate.

The objective of this conversation is to consider together whether the global OER community could design and build a world map of OER institutional initiatives.

Over the past decade, there have been more and more initiatives in more and more countries. It has become difficult to have a sense of the global OER landscape. As we seek to communicate with stakeholders, as we seek to connect with potential partners and as we seek to learn from the experience of others, we might find useful a picture of the OER world – a global map of institutional and perhaps national initiatives as a starting point. Over time, an “OER World Map” could be enhanced as the community wished and found feasible.

Maps can be effective in communicating a message visually. There are already several global maps that have been created for specific OER groups, such as, the Open CourseWare Consortium and the Open University OLnet project in the United Kingdom.

As many of you will remember, the former IIEP OER community showed enormous energy in its interaction. And importantly, the community showed a capacity to self-organize. A number of groups came together to translate the report of the group’s consensus on priorities to advance the OER movement. If mapping the OER world were seen to be useful, perhaps the worldwide OER community could self-organize to build and maintain an OER world map together.

Our conversation is scheduled to take place online over a three-week period from 12 – 30 November. At the conclusion of the discussion a draft report will be sent to everyone for review and comment.

In addition to this international discussion in English, some groups have already decided to hold similar interactions in their own languages for their own communities or networks. Their input will be shared with the international group, and incorporated into the final report of our collective deliberation and conclusions. We hope others may also wish to organize separate discussions.

I will be back in contact with further details before we begin. I am very much looking forward to being back together again.

My best,

Susan

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Outline of the international discussion

Week 1: What could an OER world map look like? (12- 16 November)

• Why map the OER landscape?
• Essential information and visual presentation

Week 2: Could a world map be built collaboratively? (19-23 November)

• Organizational approach for collaboration
• Ensuring the quality of the information

Week 3: Reflection and next steps (26-30 November)

• Design of an “OER World Map”
• Organization
• Resources available/needed
• Next steps

Please:

• Send an email to oer-community-request@athabascau.ca and type “subscribe” in the subject line.
• Share this announcement with your colleagues and networks.
• Plan a parallel or follow up discussion in your own language and network and give your feedback for the final report of all the discussions.

If you follow Creative Commons’ various social media outlets, you’ve probably heard us talking about GNU MediaGoblin’s crowdfunding campaign. Today is the last day to support the campaign, so we wanted to give it one last shout-out.

CC alumnus Chris Webber is MediaGoblin’s lead developer. It’s an open-source media-hosting platform. It’s already CC-enabled, but Chris and his team have some exciting plans for its future, so they’re running a funding campaign with the help of our friends at the Free Software Foundation. Watch the video to see what’s on the horizon:

If you’d like to help spread the word, then click Retweet below:

Today’s the last day to donate to @mediagoblin‘s crowdfunding campaign. bit.ly/T5pTrISupport open media platforms!

— creativecommons (@creativecommons) November 9, 2012

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You can also spread the word on identi.ca and Facebook.

P2PU is giving a webinar next week to help new and seasoned community members kickstart their courses, especially those just beginning to flesh out their ideas for a School of Open course! P2PU Learning Lead, Vanessa Gennarelli, will give an overview of the P2PU course design, and then dive into the step-by-step process of creating a course on the P2PU platform. I will also go over some tips and guidelines specific to creating a course as part of the School of Open, a community initiative that will offer courses on the meaning and application of “open” on the web and offline environments.

What: Course Creation 101 with P2PU (a webinar)
When: Wednesday, November 14 at 11am US pacific / 2pm US eastern
Where: Collaborate room, no registration or log-in required; simply click the following link: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.201F591479750E670246FFFB9315F5&sid=2008170. We recommend joining 5-10 minutes early to make sure you have the necessary system requirements.

If you can’t make this webinar, don’t worry; it will be recorded for posterity and linked from the P2PU website. You can also learn how to Make a P2PU course in 1/2 hour on your own while referencing these School of Open guidelines. P2PU has a help desk for platform issues you might encounter, and School of Open has a discussion list for iterative feedback.

In August we wrote about the European Commission’s request for information on the topic Opening Up Education. The point of the consultation is to gauge the need for EU action to promote the adoption and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in education. Several Creative Commons affiliates in Europe have submitted a joint response to the survey. The jurisdictions signing onto the response include Luxembourg, Denmark, Greece, Germany, Belgium, United Kingdom, Sweden, Czech Republic, France, Portugal, Serbia, Poland, Netherlands, Finland, Bulgaria, and Ireland.

The joint response urges the Commission to support the recommendations in the 2012 Paris OER Declaration, which was unanimously supported by UNESCO member nations at the World Open Educational Resources Congress on 20-22 June 2012. As described in the consultation document (PDF), “the EU will use the tools at its disposal (policy guidance, EU regulation whenever relevant, funding mechanisms, exchange of good practices and innovative pilots).” By leveraging these various tools in alignment with the suggestions laid out in the Paris Declaration, the Commission can be very effective in promoting the development and use of OER. Those recommendations urge UNESCO member nations to:

1. Foster awareness and use of OER.
2. Facilitate enabling environments for use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).
3. Reinforce the development of strategies and policies on OER.
4. Promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks.
5. Support capacity building for the sustainable development of quality learning materials.
6. Foster strategic alliances for OER.
7. Encourage the development and adaptation of OER in a variety of languages and cultural contexts.
8. Encourage research on OER.
9. Facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing of OER.
10. Encourage the open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds.

The European Commission is in a position to help coordinate, promote, and support most — if not all — of these recommendations. In addition, these recommendations align with the Europe 2020 priorities, especially in increasing effective investments in education by encouraging free open access to publicly funded educational content.

The Paris Declaration reaffirms OER as “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.” The EC should support this definition of OER so that users of OER know the rights available to them and so that producers of OER get the credit they deserve. Since a clear legal framework is crucial to the success of OER, we strongly suggest that the EC consider promoting the use of Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools like the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. CC licenses are globally applicable and are seen as the gold standard for open content licensing. It would be beneficial for the EC to adopt CC licenses because they are already established and understood, instead of creating customized licenses that may not interoperate with existing solutions.

The full response is available here.

Teaching Open Source Practices / opensource.com / CC BY-SA

It is an exciting time for the global open educational resources (OER) movement. In the past few months, several governments and institutions have shown their support for OER:

• California Passes Groundbreaking Open Textbook Legislation
• National ‘Digital School’ Program in Poland
• British Columbia Government Lends Support to Open Textbooks
• US Department of Labor Invests in Open Educational Resources
• UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration

Creative Commons believes that there is a clear role for government support of OER. When governments require open licenses on publicly funded resources, they ensure those resources benefit the most people possible. Publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources. The public should have access to what it paid for.

Advocating for government OER policies is not always easy or straightforward. Earlier this year, CC announced that we would coordinate and steward a collection of OER open policies. Since then, many members of the global OER community have been working together to compile a database of OER policies as well as toolkits, presentations, and other supporting materials. We call it the OER Policy Registry.

The policies in the OER Policy Registry are specific to OER, but may include general open access, ICT, or online learning policies that directly enable OER. There are currently over 60 policies, but we need your help to improve the registry.

First, please add new or edit existing OER open policies. We’ve put together some instructions for navigating, editing, and adding to the policy registry. If you have any questions, please email: anna@creativecommons.org

Second, please help us spread the word! We need you and your networks to help the OER Policy Registry grow and flourish. Click Retweet below to share with your followers:

60+ open policies in the new #OER Policy Registry. Find out how you can help. bit.ly/SIQKgi

— creativecommons (@creativecommons) November 5, 2012

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You can also share this announcement via identi.ca or Facebook.

Sharing our collective knowledge of existing OER open policies, in the same way we share open educational resources, will help OER advocates and policymakers learn about, craft and adopt their own OER open policies. Thank you for your help! If you have any suggestions or feedback please let us know.