Category: Open educational resources
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British Columbia moves ahead with Open Digital Textbook Project
Last year at the OpenEd 2012 Conference held at UBC, the BC government committed to being the first province in Canada to offer students free, online, open textbooks for a variety of popular subjects. It was an exciting announcement for all people who have been tracking open educational resources and the open movement in education. The project…
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Entering the Open Education Textbook Debate: Information Wants to be Free
The recent BC Government announcement on funding the creation of open access textbooks for the 40 most popular courses in post-secondary education has caused a great deal of excitement, both on the side of those advocating that commercial access to resources is an unnecessary and cost-prohibitive barrier to education, and those who believe that the…
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Open Access and Scientific Publishing
Recently in honour of Open Access Week, PhD Comics posted a video (liked to and embedded below) explaining what open access means and why the scientific community should take notice. It very clearly lays out why open access is important to science, government, universities, and students. Enjoy, and see the post below this one for…
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Open (and FREE) Textbooks
The Open Education movement has many merits in terms of providing free resources to students and instructors from K-12 to post-secondary and graduate education -“open” in terms of no commercialization or publisher/company involvement. Open also means that it has been made available under the Creative Commons licensing in terms of sharing, repurposing, and using. This…
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Finding openly licensed audio and music
I was searching for a piece of audio today for a short video that I am putting together. While I can think of a number of popular pieces of music which would suit my need, I would be breaching copyright by simply using it directly in my video. Especially since I want to eventually…
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Creating OER and Combining Licenses Video
Just stumbled upon this great animated video which may be helpful to instructors wanting to explore using open educational resources (OER) in their instructional material. The first part of the video is really useful for people getting started with OER, and the second part gets into the details of combining open licenses while respecting the range of license terms. The video was created by the good people at the Orange Grove repository, Florida’s digital…
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‘Why Open Education Matters’ video competition winner
Below find the winning entry for the ‘Why Open Education Matters’ video competition launched earlier this year by Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Foundation. The winning video was produced by the Blinktower creative agency based in Cape Town, South Africa. Great to see the winning video come out of South Africa! You can…
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Daphne Koller shares what Coursera is learning from online education
Coursera is a new education technology for-profit company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. The website provides freely accessible online courses in the fields of Computer Science, Healthcare, Humanities and Social Science, Mathematics and and commerce. Each course typically includes short video lectures and assignments to be submitted,…