Open Education 2013

Find out about the Saylor Foundation's current approach to building Common Core-aligned curricula out of existing OER. Participants will learn and engage on the following topics: How can OER help with Common Core alignment, going digital and flipping the classroom? How are students and educators using our courses? What issues do educators have in finding and using OER? How are we trying to make adoption of OER easier and more feasible? What kind of interest has there been from students, teachers, school districts and states?

The $2 billion TAACCCT Grant program from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) requires grantees to make all the grant funded curricula and training materials they develop Open Educational Resources (OER) by licensing them with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY). Currently the TAACCCT program is the largest OER initiative in the world and uniquely focused on creating curricula in partnership with industry for credentials in vocational industry sectors like manufacturing, health, energy, transportation and IT.

The Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN) made up of Creative Commons, Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, through a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant, are providing free support and technical assistance to TAACCCT grantees. Assistance includes support for:

- licensing TAACCCT grant work with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License
- finding and remixing OER
- open policy
- online learning and OER pedagogy, technology and authoring strategies
- incorporating principles of Universal Design for Learning
- ensuring deliverables are readily accessible to qualified individuals with disabilities
- developing and implementing online and technology-enabled courses using the Open Learning Initiative platform
- making use of learning analytics and data dashboards for continuous improvement and data-based decision making

This presentation will describe the TAACCCT program large scale OER initiative overall and results associated with OPEN?s work including:

- TAACCCT program priorities and requirements
- big picture view of grants made
- inter-institutional and inter-state agreements and consortia
- national outcomes, global benefits
- generating linkages for OER curricula in shared areas of study (eg. health, advanced manufacturing, energy, transportation, IT, etc.)
- evaluating and measuring success
- implementing similar programs elsewhere
- opportunities for others to tap in to TAACCCT OER

Tacoma Community College is a college that has invested in OER. By hiring of a full-time OER Project Director, leveraging faculty development initiatives and promoting the use of OER across our curriculum our college has saved students a collective $266,000 in three academic quarters (September-June). While the project has made great strides in promoting the adoption of OER, our aim is to build a sustainable model that encourages the use of OER whenever and wherever most appropriate in our teaching and learning. This initiative has required the support of administrators, faculty, staff, and students. In this panel session people who have supported the TCC OER Project will discuss how the project was initiated, how it has grown, and how we are working to sustain OER as a regular part of our teaching and learning.

Beyond discoverability and tagging of OERs, one of the biggest hurdles to OER integration into higher education is the linking of specific resources to learning outcomes, learners, activities, and assessment results in a virtual learning environment. The IMS Virtual App Store promises to provide the standards and APIs for universities, content publisher, and instructors to seamlessly and frictionlessly connect OERs to established curriculum maps. Learning Objects has published the Reference Implementation for the App Store, providing a blueprint for OER creators, publishers, and consumers to follow.

Develop metadata, search strategies, presentation optimizations, all over your valuable resources with the latest tools and techniques, that expands outreach while letting you focus directly on your content.

EdReady is a personalized learning application from NROC that directs students, especially those at risk of math remediation, to the resources they need to be ready for college. EdReady development and refinement continues, but EdReady has already been piloted at a number of sites across the country, spanning a variety of use-cases including:
- high-school classrooms (for differentiated instruction)
- online students (including hybrid classrooms, for both advanced and remedial study)
- HS graduates matriculating to college (for assessment and improvement of college readiness)
- developmental education students in college (as stand-alone, accelerated, or co-requisite remediation approaches)

EdReady is available to anyone via a free, public site with national coverage, or via customized, institutional versions for specific populations or purposes. In all cases, EdReady offers the opportunity for appropriate educational resources, especially OER, to be surfaced for students according to their specific needs. In other words, resources are only recommended in an academic context that makes sense to each student, so much of the guesswork regarding the appropriateness and utility of discovered resources has been eliminated.

For the public version of EdReady, resources are considered for potential inclusion in the resource pool (also called the EdReady Marketplace) according to open and transparent educational, legal, and technical criteria, and we welcome suggestions from the field even as we continue to scan for new offerings as they arise. For the custom versions of EdReady, resources are also available as required by the sponsoring institution. Thus, EdReady offers a pathway for OER adoption by students, teachers, and administrators that lessens the scale-up challenge that has stymied most OER projects to date.

The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) dedication to increasing the success of its students is reflected in its ambitious six-year plan, Achieve 2015, as well as through a number of important and ongoing reengineering efforts. One significant barrier to the success of its students is the rising costs of college, especially the cost of course materials. Reducing the cost of textbooks and other course materials not only makes college more affordable but also increases the likelihood that students will succeed.

The VCCS is actively working to reduce textbook costs for its students by supporting several innovative initiatives. In 2012, the Reengineering Task Force assembled a Textbook Costs and Digital Learning Resources Work Group to develop recommendations for reducing textbook costs across the system. In addition, several colleges were awarded mini-grants to develop open educational resources for a handful of high enrollment courses on their campuses. Tidewater Community College?s OpenTCC is the first college in the nation to offer a degree?an Associates in Business Admin?with no textbook costs. The VCCS has also joined other public, post-secondary institutions in the Commonwealth to establish and sponsor the inaugural Open & Digital Learning Resources Conference (openva.org) in order to build awareness of innovative OER initiatives at 2- and 4-year institutions across the state.

Despite these efforts, more needed to be done. To that end, the Chancellor invited proposals from faculty of high enrollment VCCS courses to help reduce course costs for their students by adopting free, openly-licensed materials (such as an open textbook, free digital resource, etc.) for their course. Twelve proposals were selected to receive a $3000 Chancellor?s OER Adoption Grant to identify, review, and customize existing high quality OER to incorporate as the only required material in the course. During the spring and summer of 2013, the grant cohort worked under the guidance OER experts to identify open resources, verify the licensing of selected resources, and develop high-quality courses. These courses are currently being piloted by the grantees at their home colleges.

This presentation will describe the opportunities and challenges of this effort, some initial outcomes of the project, how effectively this project synced with the other OER efforts taking place throughout the VCCS.

The Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) is a large community college district, consisting of ten autonomous colleges. The MCCCD plans to scale OER usage throughout the district by remixing and adapting current models of implementation from across the nation. To this end, a task force and steering committee have been established to develop and implement a comprehensive strategic plan to accomplish the goal of saving our students $5 million over 5 years in course materials. The project includes a strategic, sustainable OER infrastructure consisting of building awareness, professional development opportunities for faculty, technical support, marketing, and technical structure. The project will help create a culture that actively encourages, supports, and sustains the use of OER for all course levels across all ten colleges. The course materials will be a mix and adaptation of existing OER course materials as well as development of new content. Our district leaders are committed to OER and the potential it holds to improve student access to materials. Participants attending this session will learn about the beginnings of MCCCD adoption of OER, the Maricopa Millions plan and what has been done to date to achieve this goal.

Data informing the protocol was collected from four key sources: an online survey distributed to stakeholders across the higher education sector in Australia; interviews with key participants; analysis of the online publically available Intellectual Property policies of Australian universities; and a OER National Symposium held in Sydney which gathered insights and feedback from a diverse range of stakeholders across the higher education sector.
The Feasibility Protocol prompts questions on four aspects visually illustrated in Figure 1. These aspects are:
? The Opportunities involved with the adoption of OER;
? Factors related to the Challenges associated with the adoption of OER;
? Strategic Directions that need to be considered for an effective adoption of OER; and
? Policy Recommendations for higher education institutions in Australia
With the exception of Policy Recommendations, the aspects of the protocol are subdivided into three levels: the first level is focused on the higher education sector, the second level is related to organisational issues and the third concentrates on individual levels, including staff and students within educational organisations. The Policy Recommendations focus on organisational, project and individual levels.
We believe that the Feasibility Protocol is a valuable instrument that could encourage and facilitate further adoption of OER and OEP, not only in higher and distance learning institutions in Australia, but also worldwide.

In this session, leaders of 5 open textbook projects, a student advocate of open policy and a global leader in open policy will describe the adoption efforts undertaken by each of their projects and organizations. Each group has spent considerable efforts encouraging and advocating for adoption, and the details of those efforts will be described. In addition, the groups will speak to their methods for collecting adoption data, and to actual adoption of their content to date. In addition, the broader context of adoption and collaboration across the Commons will be discussed with a view to understanding how the development of collaborative relationships can help drive reuse and higher quality instructional resources.

Mary Burgess of the BC Open Textbook Project will discuss how she and her team are working to produce 40 Open Textbooks on a restricted budget and tight timeline. She will describe their work engaging faculty and student groups across the British Columbia Post Secondary System, efforts to make adoption and reuse easier for those groups, and how adoptions are being tracked.

Cable Green of Creative Commons will discuss how open policies, like those in British Columbia and California, are ensuring publicly funded resources are openly licensed. He will describe the global opportunity for governments and projects to collaborate to maximize the quality and quantity of OER.

David Harris, Editor in Chief, for OpenStax College will introduce the lessons learned from OpenStax College. OpenStax College has a rapidly growing adoption base of more than 175 institutions. David will discuss the strategies required for taking OER into the mainstream and the emerging interest in localized OER content.

Megan Beckett, Content Coordinator for Open Textbooks at Siyavula Education, will discuss their unique position as the South African government has printed the Siyavula textbooks for the whole country, thus jump starting the adoption of open textbooks in the K-12 sector. Megan will also discuss some ideas about engaging the community in the development of open textbooks which in turn feeds back into their adoption and widespread use.

David Ernst, Chief Information Officer, College of Education and Human Development, and Executive Director of the Open Academics project at the University of Minnesota, will discuss common barriers to open textbook adoption by faculty and how the Open Academics project is working to help overcome those barriers.

Nicole Allen of the Student Public Interest Research Groups will discuss how students and other members of the campus community can drive OER adoption and advocacy through grassroots efforts.

Connie Broughton of the Washington Open Course Library will discuss the project recently completed in which 81 open courses were created, including many open textbooks. She will detail their efforts to increase and track adoption during the creation of the resources and following the completion of that phase of the project.

Phukusi la Moyo, a health, Integrated Management of Child Illnesses and Safe Motherhood radio program started with funding from Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in 2009 to Maimwana in Mchinji, Malawi. As one of the trainers and facilitator in radio programming we came up with a participatory radio programming model. The participatory model involved all the stakeholders on ground in radio program designing workshop. The stakeholders included: Miamwana?s facilitators; Ministry of health?s District Health Officer, and Communication and Health education officer; Mudziwathu (in My Village) Community Radio producers, and last but not least the women?s group members representing the affected and common people.
The radio program designing workshop included messages development basing on the issues nad problems outlined in baseline survey by Maimwana, choosing a program format based on complexity of issues, program naming, Programs matrix that includes communications objectives and targets of each program, participatory radio programming training nad monitoring procedures and tools. The stakeholders owned the program though the designing workshop.
Therefore this paper describes the process and results of the participatory radio programming model which was used in Malawi. The program succeeded in achieving the goal of providing the non-formal education to the communities surrounding Mchinji and within Mudziwathu Community Radio Catchment area in giving the women?s groups discussion platform for health and safe motherhood issues. Issues discussed included those which could hardly be discussed as they were taken as taboos but were form of gender oppression on women and children. Some notable results included improvement in health care as personnel were now kind and good to clients, increased awareness of health services and danger signs of illnesses, improvement in health care seeking behavior as husbands and village headmen knew their roles in maternal and child health issues and hence reduced mortality rates.

Educational digital libraries have provided access to open educational resources for over 10 years. Although the libraries have enjoyed a high volume of visits and use of the resources, K12 teachers had not adopted and integrated the resources into their regular planning and teaching practices. In 2009, the Curriculum Customization Service (CCS) was developed to deliver online educational resources from educational digital libraries to K12 teachers as an integrated and aligned piece to their curriculum.

The CCS (ccs.dls.ucar.edu) is an online instructional planning tool designed by teachers, for teachers, with a joint research and development team from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. The CCS is designed to assist teachers in planning and implementing differentiated instruction for diverse student populations. Through an ongoing participatory design process, classroom teachers provide feedback on the system and propose new development ideas based on their current needs. The CCS provides educators with access to materials aligned to standards and the curriculum, including vetted STEM open educational resources (i.e. animations, videos, images, inquiry data) from the Digital Library for Earth System Education and the National Science Digital Library, teacher-contributed shared materials (i.e. PowerPoints, images, homework assignments, playlists), and even some publisher materials. Teachers can learn more about the practices of their peers through resource ratings, an activity feed, and shared materials. Currently the CCS is used by middle and high school Earth and physical science teachers in six school districts in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. Over the next year the tool is being expanded to include high school Algebra and Biology.

The research and development team have collected varying data about the teacher users since the inception of the tool. This includes clickstream data for all teacher users and for a subset online surveys, phone interviews, classroom observations, and student assessments. Teachers usually participate in a face-to-face or online professional development before using the CCS, where they are introduced to it, the digital libraries providing the open educational resources, and the ?shared stuff? area where they are encouraged to share their own materials with their colleagues. Data from research indicates that teachers value and enjoy using the CCS to find and use relevant open educational resources, use resources shared by other teachers, and even use publisher materials.

This presentation will provide an overview of the CCS, the participatory design process, the integration of OER into teacher?s regular planning and teaching, an overview of research results, and future directions.

After a decade and $100M US in foundation funding, an incredible amount of high quality open educational resources exist which are only rarely used in formal settings. The situation feels very much like it did with open source software a decade ago. At the turn of the century, almost everyone had heard of open source and was interested in potentially saving money and improving the stability and quality of their technology offerings, but very few institutions had either the bravery or the capacity to run systems for which there was no formal training and no technical support. Red Hat stepped into this vast pool of curiosity and caution with training, technical support, and other services that put adopting Linux within the reach of a normal institution.

Lumen is trying to do exactly same thing – step into the deep pool of curiosity and caution around open educational resources with the faculty training, academic leadership consulting, technical and pedagogical support, learning analytics services, and other pieces necessary to put adopting OER within reach of a normal institution. In the past year we've worked with dozens of secondary and post-secondary institutions and learned many - sometimes painful - lessons.

In this presentation we'll review our first year of lessons learned, including what works, what not to do, and how our business model has evolved over our first year.

With the launch of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), curriculum decision makers and teachers are facing new challenges related to identifying, adapting and creating learning materials that are high quality and aligned to the new K- 12 standards. Several states have come to the forefront in addressing these resource needs by working to develop Common Core-aligned, openly available resources, including New York, North Carolina, Illinois, Hawaii, and others. Educators and national experts in these states are developing free, online CCSS-aligned teaching strategies embedded in units of study, and are working toward common methods for defining and sharing exemplary CCSS content. [

This session will highlight how several states are developing new OER policies and technical integration approaches that may impact OER adoption based on enabling the sharing of quality content, metadata, and analytics. Using the Achieve OER and the EQuiP Quality Rubric tools embedded within OER Commons as examples, the session will further highlight evaluation workflow processes that are underway in some states to support their efforts to review, select and organize Common Core-aligned exemplars for immediate use. In addition, the session will discuss how OER evaluation and usage data that emerge out of these evaluation workflow processes can be used to continue to inform OER adoption and use within and across states.

While new open educational resources are being continuously created, little data exists on how faculty in higher education actually use and perceive open educational resources, and more importantly what types of support faculty need to help them implement the open educational resources. After developing the Open Course Library, Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) conducted a study of how faculty at the 34 system colleges use OER. The purpose of the study is to investigate 1) how and to what extent open educational resources are being used in the college classroom, 2) how faculty perceive open educational resources, 3) what type of support is needed to help faculty embrace the open educational resources.
In this study, a mixed-method design was used incorporating both quantitative and qualitative study methodologies. We began our study by developing an extensive survey in collaboration with two faculty unions of the community and technical colleges in the state of Washington. The survey was sent to all faculty in the system. Based on the survey results, we conducted a qualitative Delphi study. Delphi is a collective human intelligence process among experts, in this case, a focus group consisting of open educational resources experts in Washington CTC system. The group discussed what constitutes the best support system for faculty?s use of open educational resources.
Based on the data collected from survey, and the consensus from the qualitative Delphi study, we created a conceptual framework that informs faculty?s needs, use, expectations, and most importantly the types of support in using open educational resources.
This study will provide a roadmap for anyone who organizes the future professional development plan for open educational movement in higher education. It will remind the audiences of the most crucial aspect of building and promoting open educational resources: how to make it work for faculty.

Michigan State University is developing a new role for students in research projects across disciplines that drives the use, and adoption of, OER methodology. Called a ?Translational Scholar,? this role prepares students to be agents of change in their field. As part of a research team, graduate students not only conduct research but also serve in a translational role, creating open knowledge for stakeholders of the research.

Students create three outputs as part of their role on a research project or research internship: (1) publishable research such as a thesis or contribution to a paper; (2) a teaching case or example, including open data, in print or video designed for use in a specific curriculum; (3) training or information materials for the community or setting in which they are doing their research. The teaching case and the community materials are designed to be peer reviewed and published as Open Educational Resources.

Several initiatives at MSU have incorporated Translational Scholars into their projects. The AgShare project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is working with the RUFORUM (Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture) to scale up the AgShare Method of Translational Scholars by embedding the model in their participatory action research teams. The USAID-funded Global Center for Food Systems Innovation has built Translational Scholars into their research teams; and the National Institutes for Health-funded conference grant for One-Health created a Translational Scholar Corp to work with faculty teams.

Project leads are currently developing a shared set of Translational Scholar competencies across these projects. An Open Knowledge Convening in February 2013 resulted in an initial set of skills, knowledge and behavior required of students in this new role on a research team. We invite participants to collaborate in the creation of a Translational Scholar Corps across organizations.

College students are a powerful but often overlooked ally in the open education movement. As the primary beneficiaries of OER, students are uniquely positioned to be effective advocates to instructors, colleges and policy makers. However, students often understand openness differently than members of the community do, and may value it for different reasons.

In this session, the directors of two student efforts for open education and open access will share exclusive insight into the student perspective on openness, examples of what students from across the globe are doing to have an impact, and to begin engaging students in open education efforts.

The session will also include advice for engaging librarians and faculty members in OER advocacy, and tips for using the principles of grassroots organizing to build a movement on campus.

The need to increase access to and reduce the costs of attending college is a burden shared by all higher education institutions. One way that Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) is addressing these needs is through an innovative project to promote the use of Open Educational Resources across the curriculum in a series of general education courses available online to all NOVA students.

The OER-Based General Education Certificate project is designed to allow any student at NOVA to take one or more courses that utilize free and/or open course materials and content to deliver a high quality learning experience without requiring the purchase of textbooks or other course material. The courses can be taken individually, or the series can be completed as a certificate that satisfies the first year requirements for the Associate?s degree in General Studies. The courses included in this program cover requirements for English, Math, Science, Fine Art/Humanities, Social Sciences and Student Development. By involving faculty from many academic departments at the college, we will increase awareness of OER throughout the college.

This program seeks to affect a broad population of students by creating course options in a variety of subjects that will save students money and ensure that all students in these courses have equal access to the course materials required to be successful. This program also seeks to highlight the availability of numerous high quality OER to faculty in many disciplines, and encourage more faculty to adopt OER in more courses across the college. The faculty members developing the OER versions of the courses for this project have access to a Distance Learning Librarian, Instructional Designers, and grant funds to assist in the course development process. This team approach is designed to ensure that these courses satisfy all learning objectives and deliver an effective and engaging learning environment for students.

The OER-Based General Education Certificate is available beginning fall 2013. Students in the OER-based versions of the courses offered will save an average of $185 per course, or over $1,800 for the OER-based certificate as compared to the standard course offering. We will promote the availability of these courses to the NOVA community and collect data on student success and persistence. We expect student demand for the OER courses to be robust, and that the number and variety of courses using OER will expand over time based on the success of these courses.

Teachers never know what will trigger significant change. For this presenter, the catalyst to change was OpenEd 2012 in Vancouver. While Open Ed ?12 initiated significant change in an academic library?s approach to affordable learning solutions, collections, staffing, and space, it also caused a deeper look at what libraries are, or are not, doing to support Open Ed.

In ?The Inevitability of Open Access? (C&RL, September 2012), David Lewis acknowledges the potentially disruptive impacts of open access uptake on library collections budgets. He concludes that ?we should do everything we can to encourage and support its growth, because in the end it is a disruption whose success will make our world better? (504). Indeed, librarians have led the world in creating open content commons through the Hathi Trust and OpenLibrary. With library support, tools and directories like Sherpa/RoMEO and the DOAJ have been created that inform open content policies. Librarians have also helped shape the legal and policy frameworks that support open content, including Creative Commons, Science Commons, and the open access mandates of research funding bodies. Librarians have built hundreds of robust open content repositories, and are active in creating new models of open library access, such as the Digital Public Library of America. At a time when our budgets are strained and constricting, where we are losing our battles against publishers for access to ebooks and vendors are increasing their costs unpredictably and copyright battles weigh on campuses, libraries, and scholars, the Open movement is a beacon of hope for librarians.

But what obstructs libraries? deeper involvement in Open Ed? Why are many of the tools and repositories librarians played such a key role in creating remaining isolated from our core collections? Why is the open ethos absent from our core visions? Open content results in a tectonic shift for libraries not only in terms of collections but because truly embracing OER demands a the reconceptualization instructional services, reference services, outreach, digital scholarship, data curation and data services, and more.

This presentation will discuss these themes as well as highlight the steps one public, polytechnic university is braving to take by reimagining collections, spaces, staffing, resources, and partnerships. We will also explore specific strategies for deconstructing barriers and the results of those efforts. Rome wasn?t built in a day?this presentation will show what an Open Education program looks like one year to the day from its inception.

The NGLC-funded Bridge to Success project (http://bridge2success.aacc.edu/) reworked successful developmental courses in mathematics and learning development for use in US community colleges. This paper seeks to answer the question, how have the Bridge to Success courses continued to be used and what has been their impact? During the project, the material transcended the remit of its intended audience to impact non-governmental organisations, reaching under-served groups outside of formal education with considerable success. The courses evolved throughout the project?s duration, responding to student and instructor feedback and independent analysis as well as introducing motivational ?challenges? to Learning to Learn as the first step towards the content being badge-ready.

Whilst the project formally ended December 2012, the OER created as part of the Open University (OU)-led project remain available for use by educators and independent learners alike. In the US there is continued use of the material in both the charity and college sectors and analytics show that the materials are also being accessed at significant levels by non-US users. In the UK, the OU is further modifying the courses as part of Adult Education Week and releasing them as MOOCs where the motivational challenges are now fully functioning badges.

Building from data that showed benefits through a comparative study in the college context, this paper will consider what we can tell from a more holistic view of the impact of releasing OER and examine the signs of sustainabililty. We reflect on the advantages of whole course, remixable OER (a strategy recently advocated by Susan Badger as a way forward for the OER movement). Comparing similar types of complete offerings to Bridge to Success, such as OpenStax College, who offer remixable coursebooks, the study presents stakeholder perspectives and the challenges and benefits to those producing and using this type of OER.

This session explores the influence of self-efficacy and outcome judgment, from social cognitive learning theory, on the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). Research findings from an online survey conducted from January to March 2013 are presented. The Technology Acceptance Model is used as a framework to analyze cognitive interactions that lead to integrating OER into the professional practice of educators from different settings. Path analysis confirms model fitness and indicates a strong effect between the technical quality of an OER and its perceived usefulness. A discriminant function analysis is used to delve deeper in understanding particular differences among K-12, higher education, and workplace training professionals in their attitudes about the usefulness of OER. The K-12 audience is identified as having a high regard for the usefulness of OER in relation to their work. This finding is interpreted as OER meeting a need for quality resources among K-12 educators who may have less access to up to date digital resources on topics relevant to their instruction. Recommendations for the design of OER to improve perceived ease of use and instructional messaging for K-12 educators conclude the discussion. This session will be of particular interest for those involved in improving the formal use of OER by educators and training professionals.

Siyavula Education is a company that is building a sustainable business around open educational resources by maximising accessibility. While our openness is key to our current success it also presents unique challenges for a business. Siyavula was incubated within the Shuttleworth Foundation as an OER project and has now received venture capital from PSG Financial Services.

Of the 12 million learners in government schools in South Africa, 5 million learners currently have an openly-licensed, printed book for at least one subject, this will jump to 9 million learners in January 2014. While the Department of Basic Education has saved approximately ZAR200M (USD 25M) in doing so, the Siyavula business model is not tied to this value proposition.

By focusing on accessibility of the content in a device agnostic way, we have 420,000 (200,000 Maths and 220,000 Science) Grade 10-12 visitors on web and mobile devices and 430,000 (210,000 Math and 220,000 Science) Grade 10-12 visitors on Mxit (a chat client that supports low-end feature phones). The value of using open content, open standards and focusing on access to quality OER resources presents a unique opportunity to have widespread impact in the education sector and necessitate a shift at the policy level.

In addition, it provides the ideal testing ground for business models built around OERs that go beyond cost saving. The lack of remuneration for titles printed and distributed has been a fundamental part of Siyavula?s ability to engage with policy makers and schools but necessitates delivering value elsewhere for sustainability.

Siyavula, despite being a for-profit company, has successfully engaged with sponsors to cover hard costs of title production as they have recognised the leveraged investment that unlocking an open title in partnership with Siyavula represents, giving them national impact and with core content being released under a CC-BY licence.

The massive footprint afforded through accessibility presents further opportunities to deliver premium services and look to analytics to inform strategic decision making at the policy level. In these areas it is possible to add unique value on which Siyavula hinges long-term sustainability. I will present the details of our current business model. I will also discuss how taking the openness value proposition beyond cost-saving benefits has been key to our success as well as the options that we have explored and the challenges that we have faced in finalising our business model.

As a small agile nation Wales has to maximise resources to the benefit of the Welsh population, economy, and rest of the world. This seminar will explore how all of the universities in Wales (9) worked collaboratively to develop the concept of Wales as an OER nation for higher education and how they were able to influence government policy. This led to the government agreeing to support a statement of intent regarding the future development of OER across the nation. It will also describe some of the challenges and how they were overcome at political, institutional and individual levels and the emerging recognition of the importance of open educational practice in academic practice and delivery.

Since its inception, the open education space has been fragmented by intellectual property differences, a lack of easy-to-use tools, a desire for ownership, and a simple way to brand content. Despite the proliferation of open educational projects, the promise of OER ? the ability to easily remix to innovate ? has not been unlocked. In order to make remixing easy, we must move beyond mere openness to active sharing. New tools and standard formats have been designed to make creating and sharing OER easy.

In this session, our panel will investigate barriers to broader sharing from both faculty and institutional perspectives. We will delve into concerns around commercialization, lack of a central clearinghouse for OER, and OER quality and vetting practices.

We will also take a first look at the new version of the Connexions OER authoring and sharing platform. This new platform, created in partnership with Google, promises to make frictionless remix a reality by combining easy to use authoring tools, state-of-the-art transformation services that automatically generate a myriad of output formats including publisher-quality PDFs and ePubs for use on tablets.

Finally, we will also explore the idea of a "federated OER ecosystem" where individual institutions retain total control over their OER platform, but have the ability to push or pull open content to or from a shared central archive.

Among the most important barriers for accessing and succeeding in the Latin American Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are the costs of being a university student. Even if there is not tuition to be paid, as in the case of most public HEIs in the region, or through scholarship from the government in private HEIs, other often overlooked costs, most notably the cost of textbooks, are real impediments for low-income prospective and actual students.
This initiative addresses the problem of high cost of textbooks for Higher Education in Latin America. The main pillars of this initiative are a digital ecosystem for the collaborative creation of textbooks, a technological platform to support this ecosystem and the strategies for the adoption of the initiative in Higher Education Institutions of the region. This initiative will encourage and support local professors and authors to contribute with individual sections or chapters that could be assembled into customized books by the whole community. The created books will be freely available to the students in an electronic format or could be legally printed at low cost because there are no license fees to be paid for their distribution. This solution will also contribute to the creation of customized textbooks where each professor could select the sections appropriate for their courses or could freely adapt existing sections to their needs. Also, the local professors will be the sink and source of the knowledge, contextualized to the Latin American Higher Education system.
Professors and academic authors will be the main participants of the initiative, however the low-income students will be the main beneficiaries of the freely available textbooks.

In spring 2011, the Palau islands Ministry of Education implemented an Open Educational Resources (OER) pilot program initially at the Palau High School. The purpose of the pilot was to introduce innovative ways to engage students, enhance delivery of "on-demand" curriculum supportive material as well as to create ways to extend learning beyond the school day using digital learning technology. In 2013, the OER/iClassroom project was expanded to seven middle and elementary schools. The impact of OER on Palau schools... hundreds of thousands of dollars in textbook savings; up-to-date instructional content; and an engaging student learning experience -- with no academic decline by using OER. The pilot success is an OER showcase for the Pacific region.

The early history of the most groundbreaking technologies is often a dismal one. They might lumber along as outliers for years before the right elements come together and suddenly catapult them from the fringe into the mainstream. Online videos of lecture courses, for example, have been around for more than a decade but it wasn?t until certain conditions were satisfied that we would have the phenomenon of MOOCs. To turn the commonplace academic video lecture into perhaps an academy-altering force one needed to assemble first-rate content and maintain the integrity of a complete course, and do this with the imprimatur of top universities. This helped turn an already tired technology into a truly disruptive one.
A similar pattern is shaping up for OERs and it is unfolding across three closely related but distinct stages, viz., ?enthusiasm,? ?quality,? and ?formalization.? The first stage emerged when faculty at institutions like MIT and Rice established repositories for OERs. They may not have had a business plan, but the dream to make academic content free, flexible, and openly shareable sparked great excitement. While difficult to realize partly because of the unevenness of OER quality, the enthusiasm itself has been critical?sustaining the dream and helping to inspire those who would bring it to the second stage, the emergence of ?publisher quality? OERs.
Rice University-based OpenStax has collected large sums in foundation support to produce OERs that are on par with their commercial rivals. The production of these open license textbooks is by itself groundbreaking and extraordinary; they signal that the quality barrier has now fallen.
The early results at OpenStax have also been encouraging, with the physics book, for example, winning 3% of adoptions in less than a year. The OpenStax catalog is also growing rapidly; even now it offers materials for courses taken by millions of students. This is one effort at one university; imagine what will happen as others participate--and they will.
High quality OERs, however, will not alone suffice for mainstream use because quality isn?t the only barrier. Repositories still exist as silos, there?s little alignment of interests at the local level across the key stakeholders?administrators, faculty, and students, there are ease of use issues, and there?s not enough online support for the materials themselves (assessment, machine learning, homework, etc.). Just as quality content required the formalization of video lectures through the MOOCs, so too will OpenStax and other high quality OER content require a robust centralized platform. This need gives rise to the third stage of OER development, formalization, and it?s happening now.
The platform race is on and this talk will discuss the approaches that various organizations are taking to create the right ecosystem. Sapling, Lumen Learning, Connexions, Wiley, and panOpen, among others, are all proceeding in different but related ways. It?s a good and valuable competition for the OER movement as it provides the final component that, taken together with other two, will fundamentally reshape the way academic domain knowledge is produced and shared.

The Washington state legislature found that the recent adoption of Common Core standards provided an opportunity for the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction to identify a library of current, high-quality, openly licensed courseware that could be accessed by K-12 school districts statewide.

It may be free, but is it any good?? The question of quality is one of the overriding issues in the OER field. To address that issue, Washington state has developed a process for evaluating Common Core-aligned OER materials. In April 2013, groups of math and ELA educators convened to review OER materials in Algebra 1 and select ELA units. Results of this review as well as all the review tools are available to share as districts consider utilizing open resources. This session will cover the rubrics, process, and outcomes used in the evaluation process.

Objectives
1. Participants will understand district quality and implementation concerns for K12 OER materials.
2. Participants will understand the issues behind Washington?s OER rubric, including a discussion of material grain-size, reuse of existing rubrics, scoring, and sharing.
3. Participants will learn about Washington state?s experiences, both good and bad, with an OER review process.

When the Texas Education Agency decided to open a gateway for educational resources, they launched an enormous number of materials. Educational resources initially created to support courses inside of a LMS were re-purposed in order to share the materials with IHE partners and parents. Within the gateway, educators can access over 100 Kid2Kid videos, 2000 interactive exercises, and additional content to support student learning in grades 8-12 in core content areas. Join us as we share this resources and discuss how this resource might assist you as you develop open educational materials.

The Canadian Wildlife Federation's (CWF) main mandate is around Environmental Education and as such have developed many Open Education Resources to assist in supporting teachers, such as Project Wild, Below Zero, Climate Change, Online resources, and our Voices of the North series. In addition we have sponsored the CWF Africa to America?s unsupported row by 4 young gentlemen whose mission, in the 100 day row, is scientific research on multiple levels around the Ocean, Sleep deprivation, Webinars around the Ocean/what the rowers are seeing, and education. The presentation will focus on relating the findings (both Scientific and non-Scientific) of the Row along with sites, resources, to introduce teachers to other new and upcoming events from the Canadian Wildlife Federation, eLearning opportunities, and how the information can be connected with curriculum from a cross curricular component.