The Open University and Carnegie Mellon are working on a proposal to develop infrastructure, community and activity to help share research findings on the design and use of OERs. The draft proposal is available on an open wiki at http://iet-public-wiki.open.ac.uk/index.php/OPLRN_proposal with a discussion area available at http://iet-public-wiki.open.ac.uk/index.php/Talk:OPLRN_proposal
Author Archive for Cathy
I had the chance to meet with Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation and Eric Moeller, Deputy Director. They sent the following along for anyone interested in working for a great organization.
Wikipedia is about to hire a team of three fundraising people: one
focusing on major gifts, one focused on “community” (primarily online)
fundraising, and one on research and database management. The most
unusual and hard-to-cast role will likely be the online fundraiser:
we’ve decided it’s most important that this person have a web usability
and writing background. For that role, we would probably forgo
fundraising experience in favour of strong online communications skills.
The Wikimedia Foundation has three new job openings related to
fundraising, open until May 15. The job descriptions and instructions
to apply can be found on the Wikimedia Foundation website:
1) A Head of Major Gifts (AKA Major Gifts Officer), responsible for
executing our major gifts strategy;
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Head_of_Major_Gifts_%28Major_Gifts_Officer%29
2) A Head of Community Giving, responsible for our fundraising efforts
targeting the general public;
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Head_of_Community_Giving
3) A Development Specialist responsible for managing donor information
and supporting the above two positions.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Development_Specialist
If you are interested, please apply before May 15. Also, if you know
individuals who might be a good fit for any of these positions, please
feel free to forward this e-mail. Thank you. 
–
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
The deadline for nominations for the 2008 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC Awards) is April 14, 2008. The MATC Awards consist of up to ten $50,000 or $100,000 prizes, which a receiving institution can use in a variety of ways to continue its technology leadership. The awards honor not-for-profit institutions that have demonstrated exemplary leadership in the development of open source software for one or more of the constituencies served by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: the arts and humanities in higher education; research libraries, museums; performing arts organizations; and conservation biology.
On March 17, 2008 Trustees of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation approved $10,075,000 in Open Educational Resources grants to the following organizations:
Creative Commons (
Foothill-De Anza Community College District (
Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) (
Ithaka Harbors, Inc. (
Long Now Foundation (
Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE) (
Rice University (
Silicon Valley Educational Fund (San Jose, CA) for a planning grant to explore the use of OER in the San Jose School District ($180,000 over one year)
University of
University of
Full proposals will be availble on the Hewlett Fuondation website in a few weeks.
Please provide feedback on the 2008 Grantee meeting - free form is fine - but questions we are wondering about:
1. Is an annual meeting needed or should we move to an every other year schedule?
2. What is the value of bringing the full community together vis-a-vis segements of the community, i.e., content developers, tool developers, etc.?
3. What topics are you interested in?
4. Other thoughts.
Thanks - we will keep you posted on our next steps.
Hewlett Phase 2 OER Strategy The blog is back! Mike, Phoenix, Vic and I will be posting to the blog on a regular basis - sharing thoughts, challenges and updates as our collective work on Open Educational Resources moves ahead. Attached please find the deck that describes Hewlett’s developing phase II strategy. Seems like slide 26 caught most people’s attention.
Laurie Racine has generously offered to Hewlett grantees and other OER projects the use of the dotSUB tools for anything related to translation and closed captioning of any video you might need in multiple languages. There is no cost for this.
To fill you in on this you will find a video post from RocketBoom that talks about the tools as well as a link to the Banker to the Poor video that was done for Ashoka in advance of the Nobel Prize ceremonies (hit the dropdown menu to the right of the video (in the box labeled WATCH) to see what the captioning would look like in other languages. - again hit the dropdown window under WATCH on the right to see the captioning in different languages).
In effect this isn’t only a service, but also another place to syndicate video content - and the video has embed tags similar to YouTube that allows users to run the video on their own sites and blogs. And there is an option to output the captioned video into compressed formats like WMV or Quicktime.
Sorry for the lull - getting back on track. Writing from the OCW Consortium meeting in Santander and amazed at the number of new groups sitting here with over 100 participants. Universities from Venezuela, Iran, Korea, Vietnam, Cambridge U., Arizona State, Tulane U, Turkey, Finland are all around the table. Seems like the uptake is at a new level and the challenges equally as strong. The clear gap is the dearth of institutions from the developing world. We need the exchange of knowledge in all directions.
Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources Report - pdf version.
For Hewlett OER Report - doc version, click here.
 A comprehensive review and facing forward look of the OER field from:
- Dan Atkins, Director of Cyberinfrastructure at NSF;
- John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox, Director of PARC, and
- Allen Hammond, World Resources Institute.
Just released, A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievement, Challenges and New Opportunities. Please distribute, read, digest and discuss here at OERderves. This report examines The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s past investments in Open Educational Resources, the emerging impact and explores future opportunities.
Central to the report is the idea of “The Brewing Perfect Stormâ€Â and the creation of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure.
We welcome your thoughts, creativity and expertise!
The Open eLearning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) has just released its final version of its report on Open Educational Practices and Resouces - Roadmap 2012. The report was funded by the European Commission under the eLearning Programme and involved six project partners. The OLCOS engages in activities that foster the creation, sharing and re-use of OER in Europe and across the globe.
 The report includes a thorough examination of OER challenges in the years ahead to encourage further uptake. A clear distinction is made regarding the the production of OER vis-a-vis the their application in educational practices. The report argues for a intentional focus on innovative OER practices in the teaching and learning process if we are to transform teaching and learning. While the transformative nature of OER is what the movement is all about - we now need to move proactively to this stage. This report is a must read for anyone in the OER community.