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Thoughts on Continuous Improvement and OER

Iterating Toward Openness

Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. And this process of making OER more effective every semester – also known as “continuous improvement” – is where we see some of the most exciting opportunities to collaborate with faculty.

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Some Thoughts on the UNESCO OER Recommendation

Iterating Toward Openness

There’s great news out of the recent UNESCO meeting in Paris, where member states unanimously adopted the draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). This dramatically simplifies understanding what is and isn’t OER. Resources in the public domain or released under an open license are OER.

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What a Homework Help Site’s Move to Host Open Educational Resources Could Mean

Edsurge

In May, the homework-help site that relies on student-generated content, Course Hero, dipped its toes into freely available, openly licensed alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, course materials. This was the company’s “first foray” into OER, and it is still figuring out how the OER fits, Morris says. “I

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'Better Every Semester': How Faculty Use Open Educational Resources to Improve Courses

Edsurge

But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. Of course, commercial courseware also generates student outcome data, which traditional publishers could use to improve their products, too. They can with OER materials. It’s totally within our capability to do it.”

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38 Community Colleges Share What It Takes to Launch an OER Degree Program

Edsurge

And that’s been the driver behind nonprofit Achieving the Dream ’s (ATD) OER Degree Initiative , where 38 U.S. community colleges are creating full degree programs that utilize open educational resources (OER) from start to finish.

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Lumen Scores $3.75M — and OER Gets a Foot in the Traditional Publishing Door

Edsurge

Open Educational Resources (OER) have yet to cozy up with the more orthodox academics and pushy print publishers of the world. The most recent example occurred this week, when OER company Lumen Learning announced a partnership with one of the country’s largest textbook distributors, Follet Corporation.

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How a University Took on the Textbook Industry

Edsurge

And some credit it for helping kick-start a trend—now known as open educational resources, or OER—that has sent shockwaves through the traditional publishing industry. Some professors have aesthetic objections to OER materials. By the nonprofit’s estimates, more than half of U.S. colleges use at least one. Because most U.S.