Chris Snyder at Wired exercised his detective skills on Bijan Sabet’s recent tweet to find out who Spark Capital (one of the VCs that funded Twitter) has been talking to recently: i had a mtg with a company today & one of their execs had the title ‘Chief Openness Officer’ What company is so committed to openness that it has someone like this? Flat World Knowledge of course! :)
Version 1.3 of the GFDL was released today. Section 11 contains directions for Relicensing, giving “Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Sites” (why can’t Richard just call them wikis like everyone else?) like Wikipedia the option to change away from the GFDL and adopt CC-By-SA as their license. This is a glorious day for license incompatibility in the open content world, and one I had thought we might never see. Creative Commons also has coverage. Now the Wikipedia community just needs to choose/decide to relicense its work CC-By-SA. ...
Just a quick link to a collection of “standards” for determining whether your online courses are of sufficient quality or not. I wonder how my open courses would rate… Quality Matters Online Course Evaluation Project Standards NACOL National Standards of Quality for Online Courses
Something Scott wrote today reminded me today of one of my favorite quotes: “There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.” Versions of this quote are attributed to Emerson, Truman, John Wooden, and even former LDS Church President Harold B. Lee. Scott joins the lofty ranks of these folks by ending his description of the very interesting looking Free Learning with his emphatic assertion: ...
Here’s something you probably never thought you’d see: a list of 100 colleges and universities where you can earn your degree without paying any tuition. Most of the programs on the list look legitimate. And yes, they all have some qualification criteria you must meet to get the free goods. If open educational resources, open learning support, and open accreditation are just too hard, why not simply participate in one of these programs? After all, isn’t our ultimate goal to provide access to educational opportunity to those who go without? ...
The Open High School of Utah, the first high school to commit to using 100% open educational resources across its entire curriculum, has opened its enrollment application process and received its first application! I’m giddy with delight. If you know someone who lives in Utah, will be a 9th grader next academic year, wants the flexibility of attending an online high school, the privilege of being loaned a laptop for the duration of their studies, and the freedom to forever keep a copy of all the curriculum materials s/he uses throughout high school, invite them to enroll today!
And that’s why students rock is the title of a fabulous new post from Philipp describing the Rip Mix Learners project at UWC, which is supporting a very grassroots approach to open educational resources.
The California bill I covered a few weeks ago, authorizing the establishment of “a pilot program to provide faculty and staff from community college districts around the state with the information, methods, and instructional materials to establish open education resources centers” has inspired me to do finally do one of those things on my “one of these days…” list. As we drafted the language for the Cape Town Declaration’s Strategy 3 on Open Education Policy, I worked to champion the idea that ’taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.’ This is the line of argument that helped secure legislative funding for the Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance. This language and other great ideas did eventually make it into the Strategy: ...
As Jane reports on the Creative Commons blog, California’s OER pilot program has been signed into law: Last week, a bill enabling the California Community Colleges to integrate open educational resources (OER) into its core curriculum was signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger. AB 2261 authorizes the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges “to establish a pilot program to provide faculty and staff from community college districts around the state with the information, methods, and instructional materials to establish open education resources centers.” ...
The full text of the California bill is available online here. Or, for your reading convenience, you can view it below. BILL NUMBER: AB 2261 CHAPTERED BILL TEXT CHAPTER 671 FILED WITH SECRETARY OF STATE SEPTEMBER 30, 2008 APPROVED BY GOVERNOR SEPTEMBER 30, 2008 PASSED THE SENATE AUGUST 21, 2008 PASSED THE ASSEMBLY AUGUST 28, 2008 AMENDED IN SENATE AUGUST 18, 2008 AMENDED IN SENATE AUGUST 12, 2008 AMENDED IN ASSEMBLY MAY 23, 2008 AMENDED IN ASSEMBLY APRIL 16, 2008 ...