oer

Educational and Cost Effectiveness: OER vs Traditional Textbooks

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I’m very happy to announce that BYU has just received a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The pilot project will examine the deeper learning and cost savings that can be achieved when open textbooks replace traditional, expensive textbooks in public high school science classrooms. 15-20 public high school science teachers in Utah … Read more

Next Gen Learning Challenges Announced

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Diana Oblinger, the President of EDUCAUSE, today announced the Next Gen Learning Challenges program. Information about the program, including the involvement of the Gates and Hewlett Foundations, is included in Diane’s announcement letter below. I’m humbled to serve on the Advisory Panel for the program, and am deeply interested in the topics of the first … Read more

Identifying concrete pedagogical benefits of open educational resources

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Here’s one of the proposals I submitted for Open Ed 2010: The most naïve kind of hype around open educational resources (OER) says that OER are more effective pedagogically than proprietary educational resources (PER). Can we justify this claim? First, it is critically important that we understand that “effectiveness” is not characteristic of an educational … Read more