educational materials

The Universitat de les Illes Balears (Spain) is a pioneer in the implementation of this 4.0 concept, where professor Antonio Fernández-Coca combines face-to-face teaching, following the traditional parameters, with the external support of relationship marketing and ICT tools (such as online videos and social networks) to produce specific content aiming to support teaching in an open and shareable way.

The Teaching 4.0 website developed by professor Fernández-Coca shares the learning and teaching materials produced under a Creative Commons licence for the subject Graphic Expression in Construction, part of the UIB’s Construction Engineering degree curriculum.

Teaching 4.0 is the winner of the Universia Open Course Ware 2012 contest, organised by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and Universia.

Click here to see a video where professor Fernández-Coca explains his Teaching 4.0 concept (in Spanish).

SPARC believes that faster and wider sharing of outputs of the research process increases the impact of research, fuels the advancement of knowledge, and increases the return on research investments. Hence, the coalition is promoting changes in both the infrastructure and culture needed to make Open Access the norm in scholarly communication.

Developed by the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC activities aim to advance acceptance and long-term sustainability of an open system for scholarly communication, with a primary focus on advancing open-access models for publishing and archiving the results of scholarly research.  

The three key programme areas of the coalition are:

• Educating stakeholders about the problems facing scholarly communication and the opportunities for change;
• Advocating policy changes that advance the potential of technology to advance scholarly communication and that explicitly recognize that dissemination is an essential, inseparable component of the research process;
• Incubating real-world demonstrations of business and publishing models that advance changes benefiting scholarship and academe.

Membership in SPARC currently numbers nearly 800 institutions in North America, Europe, Japan, China, and Australia.

Launched in February 2012 with a philanthropic model, the platform ultimately plans to offer free textbooks for 25 of the most-attended college courses in the United States. The first five titles are already available and have been adopted in one year by more than 150 colleges, universities and high schools.

The books offered are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of the courses.

OpenStax College is an initiative of Rice University.

The OCL offers free or low-cost materials for 81 of the highest-enrolled courses at the 34 community and technical colleges in the state of Washington (United States).

Released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, anyone, anywhere, can use, customize and distribute the course materials. Some of the OER are paired with low cost textbooks ($30 or less), but many of them are completely free. Subjects range from biology and math to English and US history.

The Washington State Faculty Association of Community and Technical Colleges (FACTC) passed a resolution in 2012 endorsing the ideal of open educational resources on economic, educational, and moral grounds.

Funded by the Washington State Legislature and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Course Library joins the growing movement for open educational resources (OER), setting a strong example by requiring that all materials created through the programme be openly licensed to the public to freely use, adapt and distribute.

According to an analysis released by the Student PIRGs, the OCL has saved Washington's students $5.5 million to date. Students who take OCL courses save $96 on average.