Category: research
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Snapshot: OER Policy
OER Policies are typically established in order to drive change, and there are now clear examples of where policy is being used as an instrument to drive OER. The Creative Commons OER Policy Registry lists 40 policies which reflect the ways in which policies supportive of OER and open access have…
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NOVA Focus Group: Initial Thoughts
On Friday I visited Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) to run an OER focus group with instructional designers and teachers. We’ll be using the data collected as part of the project’s ever-increasing dataset, but I thought it would be worth gathering some of my initial reflections here. I was a guest…
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Flipped or flipped open?
PHOTO: CC-BY B. de los Arcos Claire Walker and I were scheduled to present at FlipCon13 last Wednesday, June 18th. Sadly, we never made it, as this silly Spaniard single-handedly decided it would be better fun to visit the local hospital, and not exactly to research their use of OER,…
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Greetings from Stillwater, Minnesota
Greetings from Stillwater, Minnesota where Bea de los Arcos and I are at FlipCon13 – the annual conference for the Flipped Learning Network (FLN). The conference is being held at Stillwater Area High School. The Flipped Learning movement is growing at pace with over 500 physical attendees and 500 virtual…
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Good Morning, Baltimore!
Well our morning hasn’t been quite as melodic but it’s exciting to be waking up in Baltimore and looking forward to the next round of research data collection for OER Research Hub. Beck Pitt and I are here for an action packed week. Later today we are heading to Anne…
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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known: nine surveys for OER research
Astronomer and writer Dr Carl Sagan is probably mis-credited as saying that ‘somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known’, though the sentence did feature in a 1977 interview with him in Newsweek magazine. Irrespective of whether Sagan or a magazine reporter made this statement I think it’s fair to say that Carl Sagan’s research…
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'Through a glass darkly' Part 2: reflection and the agile researcher
In Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus (173-174), Socrates talks about the philosopher whose mind is not in the city, where his body is, but is instead ‘in the heights above the heaven’, far away from ‘what lies near at hand’. Socrates’ observation on the dynamic between the real world and the world of philosophical…
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#oer13 liveblog – Policy Recommendations
Darco Jansen (Programme manager, EADTU) spoke about policies affecting OER use in higher education, questioning whether higher education has ever really changed that much in response to policy innovation. The full title of his talk: “Policy recommendations in the transition to open and online education: business models, policy incentives and…
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About flipped learning
Picture this: you are a Chemistry teacher in a school in Colorado; it’s Friday and you give kids a test; some kid fails, what do you do on Monday? You move on –“I’m sorry kid, I hope you can figure it out between now and the next test”. It sounds…
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Educating in Beta
Current activity within open education can be characterised as having reached a beta phase of maturity. In much the same way that software progresses through a release life cycle, beta is the penultimate testing phase, after the initial alpha-testing phase, whereby the software is adopted beyond its original developer community.…