£5.7m to develop Open Education pilot projects in UK October 15, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Education, HEA, Teaching resources, learning , add a commentFrom the HEFCE press release today:
HEFCE has announced an initial £5.7 million of funding for pilot projects that will open up existing high-quality education resources from higher education institutions to the world.
In plain English, this means making available teaching and related material in digital form — for others in HE (and elsewhere) to reuse and adapt for teaching and learning.
The press notice explains that:
Open educational resources could include full courses, course materials, complete modules, notes, videos, assessments, tests, simulations, worked examples, software, and any other tools or materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
Also spotted today: Martin Weller of the Open University writes about SocialLearn, the OU’s project to develop a social network for learning — a few steps on from its Open Education initiative, OpenLearn.
Anyone wanting to keep track of developments in Open Education would do well to check Stephen Downes’ invaluable blog, where it features frequently, eg covering recent publications and events.
Virtual Learning: Reinventing the wheel? October 9, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentThe Open University’s head of learning innovation responded to a question I keep encountering. In his answers, institutional (corporate) priorities loom large, of course — but integration and one-step authentication are also about making it work well for student and staff users.
One of the questions which crops up regularly at the OU is why we’re enhancing tools such as blogs and wikis within Moodle when there are better ones out there on the Internet which we could give access to instead. Why don’t we just provide WordPress and MediaWiki which have a lot more features than their Moodle equivalents?