Open Learning Network

This UNU Book on ‘The Why and How of Open Education’ is an introduction to Open Education (OE), giving practical guidance on the design and delivery of OE courses while wrestling with theoretical considerations of this new and emerging domain. Educators are the main targets, but it will also be relevant to policy makers, senior education managers and the learning industry as a whole.

The Moscow-based UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE) has launched a project aimed at promoting OER movement within the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic States. Basic components of the project, I am in charge of, are identifying opportunities and needs, exploring policy options, and capacity-building in the production and use of OER in CIS countries and Baltic States. To support the efficient design of the project, under the OLnet Expert Fellowship I focused my research on the major problems concerned with the production and use of OER: quality, the effectiveness of use and sustainability, as well as copyright and open content licensing issues (to the extent they are applicable within the copyright laws existing in CIS).

 The Open University OER initiative is mentioned at the Times Higher Education.

Open educational resources can be defined as ‘teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, material or techniques used to support access to knowledge’

On 15 January 2001 Wikipedia contained the words ‘Hello World!' posted by its founder Jimmy Wales. Nine years on, the site has grown rapidly to contain over 14,000,000 articles in more than 272 languages and to become one the Web’s top ten sites.

I spent most of last week attending, for the first time, the annual OpenEd 2009 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Though this was not the first event combining academic grounding and practitioner insight, that I have attended, the openness of concepts and multiplicity of spaces – virtual and physical –  for expression pushed me to think of education in many new ways.  To put it briefly this event did not only provide an opportunity for reflection on the blurring of boundaries between scholarship and pedagogy, teaching/learning practices; it also provided a community space for activists and those interested in broadening the definitions of, and participation in, education and learning.