Open Course Frameworks: Lowering the Barriers to OER Adoption | iterating toward openness

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-05-23

Summary:

I’ve been fairly quiet recently about Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded earlier this year with Kim Thanos. Lumen (for short) is where I’m spending my Shuttleworth Fellowship time, with the goal of drastically increasing the use of OER in formal educational settings in order to lower the cost and improve the quality of education. Today Lumen released "its first six Open Course Frameworks. Open Course Frameworks are an idea I am very excited about, because they greatly simplify the process of adopting OER for the average teacher or institution. Open Course Frameworks are: curated collections of OER, mapped to learning outcomes, openly licensed with detailed attribution, organized in a way that looks and feels like an online course, published on open source platforms, and compatible with Lumen’s ImprovOER continuous quality improvement service (which we are publicly showing for the first time at InstructureCon in a few weeks). In keeping with Lumen’s focus on supporting the most at-risk students, our first set of Open Course Frameworks is a developmental education sequence, comprised of: [1] College Success [2] Developmental Reading [3] Developmental Writing [4]  English Composition [5] Beginning Algebra (Developmental) [6] Intermediate Algebra (Developmental) The first four courses are published in the open source Canvas platform by Instructure. The math courses are available in the open source MyOpenMath platform. Both platforms make it easy for you to make your own copy of a course that you can extensively customize (or not) and then teach for free. And of course, because the courses are openly licensed you can pull the materials out and teach them elsewhere, too. Recent surveys have shown that faculty and administration believe that open educational resources can save students money and potentially improve student success. But the same surveys show that the biggest barriers to OER adoption are the time and effort it takes faculty to find resources, vet them for quality, and align them with course outcomes. OCFs solve these problems. Lumen is adamant that these Open Course Frameworks are now and always will be freely available. We do not – and will not ever – charge for access to these materials. Lumen acts as stewards over the OCFs as a service to the education community, in much the same way an open source software project works ..."

Link:

http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2867

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.comment oa.universities oa.copyright oa.oer oa.students oa.courseware oa.education oa.floss oa.colleges oa.lumen_learning oa.hei oa.libre

Date tagged:

05/23/2013, 10:51

Date published:

05/23/2013, 06:51