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

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 (San Francisco, CA) for general support of Creative Commons and ccLearn. ($4,000,000 over 5 years)

Foothill-De Anza Community College District(Los Altos Hills, CA) to plan and pilot the Community College Open Textbook Project ($330,000 over 1 year with additional collaborative funding from Improving Educational Outcomes in California)

Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) (Portland, ME) to develop and implement an open next-generation science learning environment that fosters innovation, problem solving, and critical thinking skills. ($900,000 over 3 years)

Ithaka Harbors, Inc. (New York, NY) to study the development of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative at MIT and the broader impact of the OCW movement on users, institutions, philanthropy, and higher education. ($180,000 over 2 years)

Long Now Foundation (San Francisco, CA) to inspire long-term thinking and foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. (Open Educational Resources $90,000 over 3 years with additional collaborative funding from Performing Arts)

Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE) (Monterey, CA) for general operating support. ($2,050,000 over 2 years)

Rice University (Houston, TX) for general support of the Connexions project ($2,000,000 over 3 years)

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 California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA) for a planning grant to build an open source, scalable, standards-based, end-to-end open webcast system for managing audio and video content acquisition and distribution. ($120,000 over 1 year)

University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI) for a planning grant to support opencourseware in health education with universities in South Africa and Ghana to ensure the project is demand driven. ($225,000 over 1 year)

Full proposals will be availble on the Hewlett Fuondation website in a few weeks.

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 Storm” and the creation of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure.

We welcome your thoughts, creativity and expertise!