Free textbooks are part of „Digital School” program « Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“Polish Prime Minister Office yesterday accepted „Digital School program with „Digital Textbooks component included. With 45 million PLN (approx. 15 million USD) funding it has been the biggest governmental Open Educational Resources initiative in Poland so far. The government has decided to fund creating full set of educational materials for grades 4-6 (9-11 year olds). All those resources will be available under CC BY license, which is fully free license according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works. Digital School program (with Digital Textbooks component) was initially drafted and proposed to the Prime Minister Office by Jarosław Lipszyc (Modern Poland Foundation), Piotr Pacewicz, Alicja Pacewicz (Center for Civic Education), Alek Tarkowski (Creative Commons Poland) with cooperation of Witold Przeciechowski (Prime Minister Office). All those organizations are members of Open Education Coalition, a network of NGOs and educational institutions promoting OER in Poland... This is a big win for Open Educational Resources movement ending several years of hard work. Almost exactly 3 years ago Open Education Coalition organized OER conference in the Polish parliament where for the first time in Poland the need for free public educational resources was expressed. Since then Coalition has grown substantially from just 4 to over 15 organizations. It must be noted that from the very beginning the Coalition was supported by Open Society Institute. Since then countless papers were published, and countless workshops and trainings have been organized. All this work is now giving visible results... Also today Modern Poland Foundation decided to re-shape it’s Free Textbooks project, which was first announced in early 2007. We have been working hard to create the best free educational resources and to prove that OER is a way to go. All educational materials we created for Physics, Geography, Mathematics and Civic Education have now millions of users. We are happy that Free Textbooks project has provided a clear evidence of OER importance. We also think that there are institutions out there which will be more competent in creating free textbooks with the help of government funding...”

Link:

http://nowoczesnapolska.org.pl/2012/04/03/free-textbooks-are-part-of-digital-school-programme/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.government oa.cc oa.oer oa.funding oa.textbooks oa.courseware oa.education oa.poland oa.osi oa.books oa.libre oa.announcements

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 18:30

Date published:

04/05/2012, 16:33