Next Monday is the beginning of the Introduction to Open Education course! Hurray! We already have over 20 participants from major US instructional technology programs (Georgia, Indiana, George Mason, South Florida) and folks from six countries outside the US signed up to participate. I suppose the USU participants (my school) are all waiting for next week to sign up… =)
I’ve had someone (who isn’t a university student, and therefore doesn’t need or want credits) ask about receiving a certificate from the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning for successful completion of the experience. So here is what I’m going to do (sorry about the detail, but if you ever want to do this at your university the detail may come in handy):
1. If we call this a “non-credit workshop with a credit option,” then everything works well policy-wise / procedure-wise here at USU. And since the majority of the folks who are participating are not doing it for credit, this makes sense.
2. It turns out that the Center can charge as much or as little as it likes for “non-credit workshops” where credit is not being awarded.
3. Therefore, if you don’t need university credits but would like a certificate at the end of the experience saying that you “successfully completed” the workshop, I will invite you to make a $50 donation to the Center. If you do the specified work and successfully complete the course, you’ll then get an official certificate from the Center signed by me saying that you successfully completed the Introduction to Open Education workshop.
4. HOWEVER, if you would like the certificate but can’t afford the $50 donation, just email me to let me know you want to earn the certificate, and I’ll be happy to send you one at the end of the class for free (assuming you do all the work).
I’m really looking forward to the class! See you all next week!
Published on
April 21, 2007 in
Uncategorized.
Tags: cosl.
The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning has been diligently searching for a Research Fellow to work with us on empirical studies of when, where, and why some of the technologies we associate with web2.0 (like tagging, rating, annotating, and recommendor systems) work or don’t work. I’m am as happy as a clam to announce that thanks to the generous cooperation of UBC’s Michelle Lamberson, Director of Learning Technology, Brian Lamb has joined COSL as a Research Fellow. More details and amazing results to follow… Congrats, Brian! – or condolences, we’ll see which turn out to be most appropriate 
Call for Papers
Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning
Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University
Conference dates are September 26-28, 2007
Submission deadline is May 18, 2007
Conference Themes
For the first several years our field focused on content production and content licensing. Today, there are thousands of full university courses and tens of thousands of learning modules available as open educational resources under open licenses like those offered by Creative Commons. However, our work isn’t finished; we’re simply nearing a checkpoint.
If our open education efforts aren’t supporting learning, we’re failing as a field. Period. And as we are beginning to understand how to produce and license content, we have to turn some of our attention to how this content is used by learners and teachers. How do they change, adapt, and localize it for their specific needs or the needs of their specific students? Do open educational resources support learning in ways different from non-open resources? In what concrete ways do open educational resources support learning?
OpenEd 2007 will focus on:
* Localizing open educational resources
* Learning from open educational resources
Acceptance announcements will be made by July 31, 2007. If your session was accepted for presentation, we strongly encourage you to submit a full paper for publication in the conference proceedings. Accepted full papers (5-10 pages) are due no later than August 17, 2007.
All submissions (short description, abstract and full papers) and presentations must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).
For more info please see the conference website http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/ or
email conference at cosl dot usu dot edu.
I am extremely happy to announce that the program for Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content is online! The conference is being hosted by COSL with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and will be held at Utah State University in beautiful Logan Utah.
Highlights this year will surely include Creative Commons General Counsel Mia Garlick answering the question “What is commercial use?.” The earth will possibly explode as Brian Lamb and Todd Richmond give talks at the same conference with the titles “DIY Educators Gone Wild: Where are the Instructional Mash-Ups?” and “Open Content: Must Anarchy Reign?” (hint: Todd will answer a resounding yes.) Representatives from UNESCO and OECD will be speaking; the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations, the main US funders behind open source in education, will be speaking. Presenters from a dozen or more countries will talk about everything from the technical bleeding-edge to the no tech zones of Nepal. And of course the major OCW projects from the US, EU, and Asia will be represented as well. It is going to be a rockin time for sure. You can check out the detailed program online, though it is subject to minor changes.
Please pass along to everyone you know. We look forward to seeing you in Logan September 27-29!
