Please post your open access or OER success stories here.
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At a recent meeting to talk about the future of learnng object repositories, I heard a fantastic story from an OCW school. A faculty member there was in the process of negotiating a contract with a major academic publishing house, and added a clause to the contract that the faculty member would retain the copyright for all of the figures in the book. He wanted this because he intended to use these figures in his teaching, and realized that if he didn’t retain the copyright, he would not be able to include them in the OCW version of his course without having to negotiate for rights.
This story suggests to me that there needs to be further conversations between the world of OER and the open access world. Rather than creating a separate political movement to change the culture within educational publishing, can we find a way to leverage the good work that groups like SPARC are doing with intiatives like Create Change (http://createchange.org )? In the end, the world of scholarship and the world of teaching converge.
– mike
Fresh from the storytelling session in Texas, I think one good idea might be to encourage video testimonies from around the world about the impact–direct and indirect–of Open Educational Resources.
One model for this–and far from the only one–is a project Intelligent Television and BioMed Central launched at the Wellcome Trust last year to assemble a digital archive of documentary material (featuring video content produced especially for the project) that highlights the importance of the open access movement for the future of science and medicine. The Soros/Open Society Institute has just agreed to support this project with a grant this year. Have a look at the film clips on the project wiki:
http:/openaccessproject.jot.com
user name: openaccessproject
password: oaproj
The directness and integrity of no-frills video can be exciting.
Love the video, Peter.
The LAMS Community (http://www.lamscommunity.org/ ) is an open community sharing OER Learning Designs (for more on Learning Design, see http://www.oerderves.org/?p=23#comment-115 ). It currently has about 2000 members from 85 countries, 120 shared Learning Designs and 2500 discussion messages. In addition to a number of English-language subcommunities (K-12, HE, R&D, etc), there are Italian and Spanish sub communities. Related to this, the current version of the LAMS software (V2) is translated into 23 languages. To trial the latest version of LAMS, see http://demo.lamscommunity.org/
Not sure if this is the kind of success story being requested, but it is a case from North America where the teaching plan for entire courses was constructed out of OER elements:
Quoting John St Clair, of the Regents Online Degree Program in Tennessee: “A colleague and I created MATH1410: Number Concepts for Elementary Education, and MATH1420: Geometry for Elementary Education exclusively with learning objects gleaned from MERLOT. (We also made assignments from a typical textbook.)”
The Tennessee Board of Regents Online Degree Program had included in its criteria for quality that instructors were required to demonstrate that they had sought our exemplary learning resources from OER sources.
I was slightly surprised to see that Peter Suber’s terrific Open Access News, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html is not included in your OER blog listings.
In response to Tom Carey’s email on April 5, 2007–what are the legal ramifications for developing these math courses using Merlot while profiting from the courses sold to students enrolled in Regent’s [distant learning] program(s)?