open education

10 can’t-miss Open Education Week events


Open education is set to increase at dramatic rates--here are resources to help your institution keep pace.

Open education is changing the way students, faculty and the world view higher education. After all, it has immense potential to help people of all ages and experience levels meet their individual learning goals.

What’s more, the use of open educational resources (OER) could triple in the next five years, according to some predictions. One of the driving forces behind the jump? Students who skip or defer classes due to the price of required textbooks or learning resources.

During the week of March 27, The Open Education Consortium is hosting Open Education Week in an effort to raise awareness about free and open educational opportunities that exist for everyone, everywhere, right now.

The group says it wants to highlight how open education can help people meet their goals in education, whether that’s to develop skills and knowledge for work, supporting formal studies, learning something new for personal interest, or looking for additional teaching resources.

Universities, colleges, schools and organizations from across the globe will showcase their efforts to make education more open, free, and available to everyone.

(Next page: 10 Open Education Week resources and events)

The week-long awareness event features presentations scattered throughout the U.S., as well as webinars, activities and resources.

Open Education Week events and resources (visit Open Education Week’s main page for more):

1. Open Textbooks Adoption – the Juice IS Worth the Squeeze
Adopting a new textbook, whether open or traditional is a process – but the question you have to ask is: does the reward outweigh the challenge?

2. OER Degrees Emerge in Maryland and Texas
Leaders of the OER Degree projects at Austin Community College, TX and Montgomery College, MD including a head librarian, faculty department chair, and two vice-presidents will share their work over the last 9 months to engage faculty and staff in adopting OER for creation of a General Studies degree where students do not have to pay for instructional materials.

3. Putting the Person Back into Personalized Learning
In this session, participants will learn about digital personalized learning platforms, including Lumen’s Waymaker. Learn about the ways in which technologies are being leveraged to customize the individual learning experience and enhance the communication between faculty and students.

4. Made with CC: Open Business Models
“Made With Creative Commons” is a Kickstarter funded book, coming out in 2017, investigating and documenting the successful practices and strategies of businesses and organizations around the world who use Creative Commons as a central part of what they do. This session will report out on the findings. Twenty-four case studies of organizations who are both part of the Commons and financially sustainable will be shared.

5. Having It All: How Open Educational Resources Give Faculty and Students What They Want
This presentation shows how building eLearning courses which are accessible, use open educational resources, universal design principles, Quality Matters standards, and gaming elements can improve student success, satisfaction and retention.

6. Tools of Engagement Project (TOEP)
The State University of New York Tools of Engagement Project (TOEP) is an on-demand discovery learning professional development model. The goal is to encourage faculty and staff to explore and reflect on the use of emerging technology tools to expand tech-infused pedagogy.

7. Open education and the modernisation of higher education in Europe
This presentation brings an overview of a number of JRC studies on open education, to include the OpenEdu Framework, designed to support the strategic planing of open education by educational organisations.

8. The Ideas Box
The Ideas Box is a mobile “pop up” ​multimedia​ center that provides educational and cultural resources to communities in need, including refugees and displaced persons in camps around the globe, and underserved communities in developed countries. Each Ideas Box contains a server, generator, 25 tablets and laptops, a cinema, games, arts & crafts, and a stage for music and theatre.

9. COMOSA Connect Community of Practice
The Commonwealth Open Schooling Association (COMOSA) is launching a community of practice (CoP) website for educators/professionals who are involved in Open and Distance Learning (ODL) and promoting open schooling practices.

10. OERs: A Curator’s Perspective
This blog post features an interview with a faculty member who assembled and annotated an array of OERs for our competency-based program. She shares her approach for locating and curating the OERs in a thoughtful way to maximize student success.

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