Open Educational Resources Newsletter Summer 2006 Welcome to the inaugural edition of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources Newsletter. Our plan is to have three editions each year - after each Hewlett Board meeting to keep you up-to-date on our funding in the field of OER and to build synergy among projects in general and our grantees in particular.   The OER movement is taking off thanks to the community of practitioners committed to making high-quality educational materials freely accessible to everyone, everywhere.   We invite you to sign up to receive future newsletters via e-mail by clicking here. Hold the Date – Everyone is Invited 2006 Open Educational Resources Conference   Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content hosted by the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University September 27-29, 2006 The field of Open Educational Resources is gaining momentum around the world. Literally hundreds of open education projects are springing up from Nairobi to Boston from Paris to Beijing. Over 2000 courses are now available through OpenCourseWare projects alone. Add to this the growing number of open access learning object repositories, increases in the number and quality of open source educational software projects, the open education work agencies like UNESCO and the OECD are doing, and the field is diversifying as quickly as it is growing.  Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content is a multidisciplinary event designed to promote the discussion of the variety of research, development, and other activities necessary to move the field of open education forward. Hewlett Grantees - Hold the Date The next Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources grantee’s meeting will be held Tuesday and Wednesday, March 27-28, 2007 and is hosted by the Connexions Project, Rice University in Houston, Texas. The Economics of Open Content Hewlett supported Intelligent Television’s symposium on "The Economics of Open Content" held at MIT in January, 2006. Over 100 participants attended the two-day event with 35 speakers examining new business models for making high quality content freely available. Featured speakers included New Yorker economics columnist and bestselling author (The Wisdom of Crowds) James Surowieck,Sumir Meghani of Yahoo!, and Yale Law School Professor Yochai Benkler.  Click here for streaming video and downloadable podcasts from WGBH's Forum Network. OECD Survey Contributed by Jan Hy len, Principle Investigator, OECD   OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation is carrying out a study on Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education. As one part of that study we are launching a web based survey for individual teachers, instructors and researchers using or producing OER. We would like to invite anyone working in a higher educational institution that uses or produces open learning content, such as courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals, or open software tools to develop, use, re-use and deliver learning content, to take the survey. It will not take more than 10-15 minutes to complete. To access the survey, click here. OpenCourseWare Grows into a Movement Contributed by Stephen Carson, Senior Strategist, MIT OpenCourseWare An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality teaching materials, organized as courses.  The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware. The Goals of the Consortium: Extend the reach and impact of opencourseware by encouraging the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials around the world. Foster the development of additional opencourseware projects. Ensure the long-term sustainability of opencourseware projects by identifying ways to improve effectiveness and reduce costs. The OpenCourseWare (OCW) Consortium is a growing collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. Consortium members include universities from China, ParisTech "Graduate School", Japan OCW Consortium, India, South Africa, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Thailand and Vietnam. We are pleased to announce the unveiling of the OCW Consortium Portal now available. The site includes a basic cross-site search functionality for member institution sites, a list of participating institutions (linked to profiles of each school if provided), and information for other institutions or organizations who may be interested in sharing their content or supporting the movement. In addition, the site includes news from around the consortium.  For more information on Consortium activities, please contact: Stephen Carson, Senior Strategist, MIT OpenCourseWare, (617) 253-1250. UNESCO’s Forum - An International Community of Interest on OER Contributed by Susan D’Antoni, UNESCO/IIEP   The UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) created an international community to reflect on and discuss OER, with a keen interest indicated by 500 participants from 90 countries, 60 of which are developing countries.   The structured forum was held from 24 October to 2 December 2005 to explore the concept of OER and to learn from expert discussants about experiences of a number of institutions in providing and using OER.  The discussion highlighted critical issues related to OER – faculty experience, intellectual property rights, learning object repositories, and cultural and language concerns.  With an average of 100 messages exchanged each week, the discussion was rich and lively.  Each session was introduced by a note and summarized in a report.  Click here to view.  Toward the end of the forum, participants were invited to identify the most important issues to be addressed in order to promote and enable the OER movement.    In March, the group reconvened as a Community of Interest to explore one of the issues put forward – the identification of the most pressing research questions, which you can view by clicking here.  Discussion is continuing on an important need raised in the discussion – a Do it Yourself/Do It Together resource/portal.  In October the IIEP community on Free and Open Source Software will share its reflections and suggestions about FOSS tools for OER.  And in November the findings of the study of OER undertaken by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation will be shared and discussed.    In time, the group will evolve into a Community of Practice comprised of those who wish to become actively involved in the promotion, creation and use of OER.  In that community they will find ways to continue to share information and to collaborate in an open manner, as befits the philosophy of the Open Educational Resources movement.   For more information contact Susan D’Antoni, UNESCO/IIEP. Mobile Open Content for Learning Contributed by Judy Breck   A digital delivery device for learning content is already in the pockets of millions of students. They call it their “mobile” — or “cell” in the U.S. Even the most basic of these phone devices is a powerful computer connected to the global information network.   There are over a billion reasons to get learning content into the mobile venue: those reasons are the billion plus people who will have a mobile phone in 2006, while having no other kind of digital network connection. Reinforcing the importance of those numbers in narrowing the digital divide is the far greater proportion of mobiles to PCs in underdeveloped locations. Mobile phones can bring learning content into places where almost none has gone before.   Right now is the ideal time to put open learning content in place as the mobile standard. With fast evolving features, mobiles are flooding into populations. Transmission and reception are proliferating. Broadband is really happening, at last. All of the phones out there now can receive open content for learning in mobile-specific formats, during today’s transition to the near future when most mobile users will be able to browse the Internet.   Here are some action suggestions for mobile open learning content delivery: Create tutorials for school subjects in text format, useable by essentially any mobile phone, and release those tutorials into the phone networks as open content. Nudge academic podcasts popping up on campuses into the mobile open content venue. Reformat learning objects and courseware for the mobiles, making this content openly available for Internet download and cross-platform, inter-phone beaming. Keep learning content outside of the walled gardens that are befuddling commercial mobile content applications.   Judy Breck is the author of 109 IDEAS for Virtual Learning: How Open Content Will Help Close the Digital Divide. Her blog is GoldenSwamp.com. World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunisia In November, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan assembled world leaders in Tunis for the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society. Participants affirmed a commitment to “providing equitable access to information and knowledge for all” by numerous methods including “providing equitable, open and affordable access to, and preserving diverse and varied content, including in digital form, to support informal and formal education, research and innovation…particularly in underserved communities.” There were a variety of sessions that explored issues of Open Educational Resources.    Two Hewlett staff members attended the Summit. Hewlett participated in a panel session focused on OER and OpenCourseWare and joined in UNESCO’s High Level Roundtable “Shaping the Future through Knowledge.” We also hosted a press conference to publicize the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan African grant to the African Virtual University and the launch of the Development Gateway topic page on Open Educational Resources. The Development Gateway was incubated at the World Bank and is now a separate nonprofit committed to assisting developing countries bridge the digital divide. Since the November launch, the OER topic page has quickly become the most popular of the twenty-five topic pages on the Development Gateway portal. Featured OER Column Contributed by Marshall Smith, Education Director, Hewlett Foundation   Many of us have been discussing the issue of sustainability of OER projects and the OER field. Part of the equation for sustainability requires that there is widespread understanding of the concept and promise of OER.  To this end we are publishing this newsletter and a logo for OER. Another strategy is to write about OER and publish for a variety of audiences.  Cathy Casserly and I have a piece coming out in the Fall in Change Magazine - a prepublication version can be seen by clicking here.  We just read a very interesting piece by Charles Vest, the former President of MIT called Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University.   For a provocative piece we recommend Jaron Lanier's "Digital Maoism" and the responses of a variety of people including Jimmy Wales, Esther Dyson and Kevin Kelley -- which can be viewed by clicking here.  We are very interested in hearing about other recent publications that are pertinent to the field of Open Education Resources.  Please send us your favorites.    Another part of the equation for sustainability has to do with the intellectual property rights assigned to a piece of open education content. Creative Commons has four categories for their licenses which a user may mix and match: attribution (or not); non-commercial (or not); derivatives allowed (or not); and share-alike (or not). We do not have good evidence on the effects of various combinations of these categories on sustainability (of the project content and of the overall future of the OER movement) but we have some hunches that we would like to explore.    Many teachers worldwide would like to create their own content and, perhaps, in so doing, reuse and revise existing content. This is one of the attractions of OER, but if a body of content carries a “no derivatives” license, that content cannot be revised and reused. As another example, if content carries a non-commercial license it is not clear whether a NGO can print and sell the printed copies at cost, say to hospitals in Ghana or Boston. It is also not clear whether a public community college in the US could use the material in a credit course where tuition is required. Yet many of our OER materials carry a non-commercial license, which appears to reduce their utility and could help stifle the movement.  A few hundred words do not capture the subtleties of the issues -- we provide these thoughts to spark comments, rather to settle the issues.   Hewlett Foundation Awards more than $13 million   The trustees of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded over $13 million in support of Open Educational Resources at the February and June board meetings. Below, we provide a short description of each funded organization/project organized by area of focus. Starting this year, in an effort to become more transparent in our work and to create opportunities for greater collaboration among Open Educational Resources projects, we are making accepted proposals as well as reports openly available on our website. Click here to locate proposals and reports available for viewing.   Open Content   Internet Archive, under the leadership of Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive has continued to lead—and prod—the field of open content. This general support grant allows the archive to expand universal access to knowledge by providing the public with an astounding array of collections, including copies of the entire world wide web, and by making available unlimited storage and access for collections of materials that would otherwise not be obtainable. The archive is one of the web’s 150 most popular sites.   European Association of Distance Teacher Universities will develop a comprehensive plan to place free web-based, multi-language courses on the web to stimulate learning and create a consortium of open universities dedicated to lifelong open learning. This use of OER supports the European Commission’s Lisbon strategy designed to boost investments in human capital through improved education and skills. Under the planning grant, preparations for the establishment of a nine-country consortium of open universities dedicated to lifelong open and flexible (LOF) learning will be finalized. The consortium will focus on two offers: one for individuals, i.e., open tasters (people everywhere who are not enrolled in university will have access to free courses) and one for students (i.e., including the same courses, formally assessed and examined). Both sets of courses will have technology learning supports while the second set also has human instructors involved.   In the first offer, learning is placed within an informal context. In the second offer, learning is placed within a formal context. The first offer enables all European citizens to freely acquire knowledge and skills. The second offer enables them to receive associated certification and labour market recognition.   Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), is provided support to continue development of the National Repository of Online Courses, a library of high-quality high school, Advanced Placement©, and undergraduate courses that are distributed free to students and teachers and through various revenue generating licensing fees. Under its initial Hewlett grant, NROC successfully produced twenty-six one-semester courses and a consumer-oriented course evaluation guide, establishing itself as a leader in developing high-quality courses for the web. NROC will use the new grant to ensure that the existing courses are made widely available for free, to expand its library of courses, and to continue work on its business model. Grant funds will also be used to develop HippoCampus, a free, public homework help website for high school and college students that offers NROC multimedia correlated to most major textbooks.   Open University of the Netherlands willsupportOpen Educational Resources for Dutch higher education by re-engaging adults in lifelong learning.  The OpenER project will offer sixteen courses suitable for independent study, with optional opportunities for formal assessment.  In addition to its intrinsic value, OpenER hopes that the free courses will attract and motivate potential students to enroll in regular, formal education. Research will be conducted to analyze the project’s longer-term impact on higher education participation rates in the Netherlands. The Ministry of Education of the Netherlands is also investing in this effort. (Jointly, the Rector of the Open University of the Netherlands and the Pro-vice Chancellor of the Open University of the UK, will lead a plenary keynote on OER at the European Commission 2006 Conference in Helsinki, Finland, to heighten awareness of OER throughout the universities of Europe.)   Open University (OU) of the UK, to support this preeminent institution’s participation in openly sharing both its internationally recognized content and its leading edge “next generation” tools in support of student learning in an open environment. In 2005, the Foundation provided a planning grant for the OU to study how to contribute to the OER movement without adversely impacting its business model. Having completed that study, the OU now seeks to join the OER movement by making a portion of its higher education learning resources freely available, and by providing users with innovative tools to help them learn and interact in collaborative communities. Course content will be drawn from the OU’s rich range of academic offerings and will be connected by pathways to enable users to develop coherent learning plans. In addition, OU content will then be placed in a repository—a supported open site for learners, and will build a content depository—an open site for creators. This allows the university to maintain quality vetted content in the repository while providing a space for new creators to localize, remix, and improve upon the content.    Tufts University, will continue creation of its OpenCourseWare collection which focuses on routine, dental, and veterinary medicine as well as international affairs, fields in which there currently are not available OCW materials. Tufts has made twenty-five OCW courses available with its prior Hewlett grant; and the new grant will place an additional thirty courses online, including those that use interactive multimedia case content.    WGBH, for expanding Teachers’ Domain, a website housing high-quality digital resources for K-12 education. Through this grant, WGBH will create twenty new science teaching exercises, integrating some of the videos and simulations developed by our other OER grantees. WGBH will also re-examine the intellectual property rights pertaining to its existing collection of 1,500 science resources and devise a plan for making them openly accessible. A national meeting with public broadcasting stations will be convened by WGBH to explore opportunities for increasing open access to public broadcasting content.    Yale University to create a suite of digitized audio-visual undergraduate liberal arts courses to be made freely accessible through the Internet. Materials related to the courses will accompany the transcribed and searchable video lectures to provide users with a powerful learning environment. In addition to preparing seven courses for full publication under this grant, Yale proposes to address intellectual property, assessment of pedagogical impact, site design and various technology issues in the pilot phase. Ultimately, Yale aims to make avalible online several dozen undergraduate courses spanning the range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social science, and physical and biological sciences.    Stimulate Use and Remove Barriers   Academy for Educational Development,as part of its commitment to the Education for All objectives, has been building a global network of partners to support access to quality educational content in developing countries. Central to AED’s plans is the Global Learning Portal (GLP), a website that aggregates educational content from around the world and in multiple languages. GLP also provides collaborative communication tools for networking educators both within and across countries. The GLP is supported by a strong alliance that includes USAID, UNESCO, SUN Microsystems, MIT, and several ministries of education. Its content partnerships include more than fifty of the top content repositories from around the world. This grant will help support development of the portal and expansion of the global alliance.    African Virtual University (AVU) will develop the Open Educational Resources Architecture, an initiative of the AVU and partner institutions to ensure the rational and coordinated expansion of the OER movement.  In this first formal step toward creating a regional OER hub in Africa, the grant will unite the efforts of other organizations currently involved in increasing access to higher education and training in Africa through the use, creation, dissemination, and organization of OER.  By examining its current initiatives, and addressing the gaps that exist, the AVU intends to create an enabling environment for OERs to flourish across the continent in support of higher education and training.   Commonwealth of Learning (COL), is an inter-governmental association of fifty-three member states of the British Commonwealth and is devoted to using technology as a means of increasing the scale, quality, and impact of education and training systems. COL intends to encourage its membership of forty-seven developing nations to use and create web-based OER. This Hewlett grant will provide support for three activities: a COL-wide conference with some focus on OER; the Virtual University of the Small States of UCOL to make technical training course materials open on the web; and open web-based material and training to increase research and evaluation capacity in COL countries.   Consortium for School Networking has developed a major leadership initiative on Open Technologies to raise awareness about Open Educational Resources and its potential for the K-12 learning community in the U.S. This initiative is designed to increase the capacity of technology leaders, particularly at the school district level, to understand options around open technology and open content.   Creative Commons, acting as a fiscal sponsor for Hal Plotkin, will help raise awareness and visibility of OER through the development and distribution of an OER Policy Guidebook for Higher Education Governance Officials. The goal of this project is to accelerate progress in the creation and use of OER by encouraging the enactment of supportive institutional policies and increasing support for these activities.   Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) will continue development of the Open Educational Resources Portal, a website that allows users to search, browse, evaluate, download, and discuss open educational resources. The OER Portal will play a central role for Hewlett grantees and the broader OER community in our continuing efforts to stimulate the adoption and sharing of exemplary content. Perhaps more importantly, it will be a place where users can contribute input and interact with others who are interested in supporting open educational resources. This grant will enable ISKME to complete the development of the portal with release slated for fall 2006. Grant funds will also support needed OER field-building activities such as awareness raising, convening, research and analysis, and capacity development challenges that arise within the field.   Intelligent TV, under the fiscal sponsorship of Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, will increase the understanding of educators, technologists, video producers, and other stakeholders about uses of video and open content. The Open Education Video Project will conduct a nationwide survey of university uses of video, prepare detailed case studies of the use of video at two universities, prepare a white paper recommending new approaches to sustain open educational video, and conduct a review meeting on open education and video where stakeholders can better plan for the future of open educational video.    Meraka Institute, located in South Africa, will support research on the use of Open Educational Resources in primary, secondary, and tertiary education and within communities outside of the education system. A scenario-planning exercise will be conducted to explore possible futures of OER in Africa in light of advances in local and worldwide content, changes in information technology, and the onset of use of the web to enhance social connectivity.   Massachusetts Institute of Technology will develop and implement a strategy for promoting the adoption and diffusion of Open Educational Resources in India. The work will be conducted under the auspices of India’s National Knowledge Commission (NKC) and led by Dr. M. S. Vijay Kumar of MIT, whose recent appointment as advisor to the NKC presents a unique opportunity to engage in this work.  Anil Srivastava, consultant to the World Bank and National Knowledge Commission, who has been closely associated with the World Bank’s work in this area, and in facilitating Open Content initiatives as well as with the India National Knowledge Commission, will work closely with Dr. Kumar in this effort. One Economy uses the Internet to connect low-income people in the United States to information and opportunities where they live. Its popular website, The Beehive hosts open education, health, and employment information geared specifically to low-income audiences and trains disadvantaged youth to teach affordable housing residents to use their computers and the Internet as a resource. Grant funds will support One Economy to improve The Beehive content for disadvantaged students and their families in the Bay Area, and employ local at-risk youth to help residents of affordable housing development access and use of the Beehive. The grant is supported collaboratively with Hewlett’s Regional Program.   UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning will continue its on-line forum to extend its original OER “community of interest” to a “community of practice” by continuing to explore issues in relation to the provision and use of OER with member representatives from developed and developing countries, OER providers and users, and persons interested in the potential of OER. The original forum was truly international in scope – with almost 500 participants representing 90 countries, of which 60 were developing countries. The ultimate intended outcome is a “community of practice”, which will serve to link practitioners in the area of OER and share ongoing practices and knowledge about uses. The formation of a community of practice can be seen as a natural evolution that will support ongoing interaction and mutual support among its members to advance the use of OER worldwide.   University of Iowa, Widernet, to continue to enhance its services for delivering OER to African institutions. WiderNet loads a hard drive with digital content and distributes the drive to remote locations. When the drive is connected to a school’s internal computer network, users are able to access the content as if browsing the web. Partnerships now include the African Virtual University (AVU), the World Health Organization, and Computers for Africa.    University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Communication, will explore a variety of social software tools and technologies to create viral learning communities to facilitate the uptake of OER. The idea of viral learning communities builds on marketing strategies that encourage people to pass along content and invite individuals in their own networks to join. Keep the Community Up-to-Date Let us know what is happening and will be happening of importance in the rapidly evolving world of Open Educational Resources. Please e-mail us at oer@hewlett.org.