elearning_label_learning_and_society
17th May. Events in Spain to celebrate Internet Day 2013
The World Information Society Day, also known as Internet Day, is observed every year on 17 May since 2006. The main objective of the day is to raise global awareness of the possibilities offered by new technologies and promote widespread Internet access, reducing the digital gap.
This year, the day will be celebrated throughout Spain with conferences, training sessions, competitions, online games and many other activities.
Universities will invite middle and high school students to virtually visit their premises and ask questions about their academic future.
The main event of the day will be held in the Spanish Senate in Madrid, where a high level panel debate will discuss about sustainable creativity and several awards will be handed.
All activities will be promoted and commented in Twitter with the hashtag #DiadeInternet
19th EUNIS Congress - ICT Role for Next Generation Universities
The 19th edition of the EUNIS Congress is an ICT conference centered on the theme of higher education in Europe, which will be held in Riga (Latvia) from the 11-14 of June 2013.
EUNIS 2013 is the 19th congress in a series of conferences aimed at audiences from higher educational institutes. The following keynote speeches will be the centerpiece of this year's event:
- Richard Katz (President at Richard N. Katz & Associates) -
- "IT Leadership and Governance for Next Generation University"
- Voldemar A. Innus (Owner and principal of VAI Consulting, Pendleton, NY, USA) -
- "Innovation, incubation and the future of ICT in support of the academic mission"
- Ian Dolphin (Executive Director at Sakai Foundation)
- "The CIO and Finding the Future Technology Ecosystem Fit For Your Organization"
- Dr.Jan-Martin Lowendahl (Research Vice President at Gartner, Higher Education Strategies)
- "Opening Up Education – The European Commission initiative towards more ICT and OER in Education and Training Systems in Europe"
- Ricardo Ferreira (Policy Officer at European Commission)
- "Technological Tools for distance Collaborations"
- Greg Palmer (Executive Director at University of Pennsylvania, MAGPI (the Mid-Atlantic Gigapop in Philadelphia for Internet2))
- "Current status of Open Source and Kuali for administrative systems and the “Marketecture of Community”"
- Jennifer L. Foutty (Executive Director at Kuali Foundation)
- "Management Trends in Educational Institutions"
- Greg Mathers (RTU Riga Business School,Director of Accel Performance Consulting)
- "TERENA initiatives and the future of online video in Higher Education"
- Vicente Goyanes (Head of IT-Media technical assistance for University of Vigo & Campus do Mar, member of the TERENA Technical Committee and the Opencast Boarda)
Building open bridges: collaborative remixing and reuse of open educational resources across organisations
“Building open bridges: collaborative remixing and reuse of open educational resources across organisations” is a paper published in March 2013 by the University of Nottingham (UK) exploring new creative collaboration practices related to OER.
Authors Tim Coughlan, Rebecca Pitt and Patrick McAndrew explore in this paper practices that, developed as a set of course materials, were released as OER from the UK, remixed for a US context by a cross-organisational, cross- cultural team, and then reused in a broad range of educational settings. The approaches taken during these remixing and reuse activities as novel forms of creative collaboration are also analysed.
Researchers identify how openness has provoked novel inter- organisational collaboration and forms of ownership. They also define forms of open practice that need support and present issues that should be considered in devising and supporting open projects in education and beyond.
Perspectives on Open and Distance Learning: Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice
“Perspectives on Open and Distance Learning: Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice” is one in a series of publications by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) examining Open Educational Resources (OER).
The book, initiated by the UNESCO/COL Chair in OER, describes the movement in detail, providing readers with insight into OER’s significant benefits, its theory and practice, and its achievements and challenges.
The 16 chapters of the volume, published in May 2013, have been written by some of the leading international experts on the subject and are organised into four parts by theme:
- OER in Academia: describes how OER are widening the international community of scholars, following MIT’s lead in sharing its resources and looking to the model set by the OpenCourseWare Consortium
- OER in Practice: presents case studies and descriptions of OER initiatives underway on three continents
- Diffusion of OER: discusses various approaches to releasing and “opening” content, from building communities of users that support lifelong learning to harnessing new mobile technologies that enhance OER access on the Internet
- Producing, Sharing and Using OER: examines the pedagogical, organisational, personal and technical issues that producing organisations and institutions need to address in designing, sharing and using OER
European MOOC Summit
Many European universities are engaging in MOOCs-related initiatives. Some host their MOOCs on US platforms, while others are developing their own platforms. What strategies do European universities employ?
The École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) will host a meeting in June in preparation for the Fall 2013 Summit regarding Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) at European Universities.
The questions to be discussed include:
Why do European Universities engage in MOOCs? In which languages are they produced? Which audiences are targeted? How effective have the first MOOCs experiences in Europe been? Why should Europe have its own platform? How do MOOCs build upon existing online learning activities? How do regional, national or European governments see their role? What is the impact on mobility of European students? Which research initiatives are launched in Europe? What are the new business opportunities?
Key actors will gather at EPFL for two days of sharing information. On the first day, participants will have 5-10 minutes to present the state of affairs in his or her institution, i.e., what has been achieved so far and what are the key challenges. The second day will be structured around the themes that will emerge from the first day, such as those mentioned above.
EduSenior offers a free course on Senior Education
The EduSenior project aims to improve the quality of educational institutions that currently are offering courses and activities or wish to implement a learning activity aimed to senior learners (65+ or retired).
Supported by the European Commission’s the Lifelong Learning Programme, EduSenior is offering from June to September 2013 the free online course “Senior education: A Quality of Life approach to assessing educational institutions”, targeted to professionals, decision makers, students and, in general, anybody interested in the topic of adult and senior education.
The virtual classroom will open on May 27th, and the course will start on June 3rd. The course is 100% virtual and will be offered in English and Spanish (different groups). Participants will also have the option to choose the intensity which best suits their needs:
- A 4 months course: June - September 2013.Average time required: 8 h. per week
- Or a 2 months course: June - July 2013. Average time required: 16 h. per week.
The course is organised by the Senior Citizens’ University (Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain) and the Akademia im. Jana Długosza (Jan Długosz University, Częstochowa, Poland) and is part of the EduSenior project “Evaluation toolkit on seniors’ education to improve their quality of life" (QEduSen).
The topics to be addressed during the online training sessions are:
- Introduction to the needs and requirements of the elderly and potentialities of education
- Analysis of educational factors that help increase seniors’ competences and increase their quality of life, with real examples and other case studies.
- Introduction to the evaluation process to increase quality in an institution.
- Application of the EduSenior evaluation toolkit
The online registration to participate in this course will remain open until 26 May.
TEL-Map project survey about technology supported, innovative learning practices
The TEL-Map European project, funded by the European Commission, has launched a survey about technology supported, innovative learning practices.
TEL-Map is a Coordination and Support Action focussing on roadmapping activities for innovative forms of learning. A roadmap can be understood as a ‘strategic lens’, through which future developments in a domain or an organisation are analysed for the purpose of channelling available resources wisely.
The aim of this new survey is to collect the views of teaching professionals to inform future roadmapping activities by probing certain statements with regards to their likelihood, desirability and – when it comes to policy measures – their feasibility.
There is no need to be an expert in all areas addressed to answer the survey, as the objective of TEL-Map is to get feedback from people with as diverse backgrounds as possible.
Question blocks have been created for each of the following innovative practices:
- Gamification: using game mechanics and elements of game design in non-game contexts in order to motivate learning. Controversial issues evolve around 'hunting for points as a distraction of learning', neglect of demographic particularities, availability of gamification strategies.
- Free Massive Open Online Course: bringing existing courses to an extended audience by driving technological and economical innovation. Controversial issues evolve around funding models, accreditation, high attrition rates and possible ways of highly automated learner support.
- Flipped classroom: inverting classroom situations so that the lecture part is moved from school to home and the exercise part takes place at school. Controversial issues evolve around managing differences between learners being more or less successful doing their homework, which requires fundamentally new types of in-class activities.
- Seamless Learning (Ubiquitous Learning): obliterating borders between different technologies and learning formats such as formal and informal learning or individual and social learning. Controversial issues evolve around the ownership of learning tools and data generated by learners' activities, or the potentially invasive character of learning technologies to the detriment of a balanced life style.
Open Course Library
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) launched the Open Course Library (OCL) in 2011 in response to the impact of rapidly rising textbook costs on student success and completion. Phase 1 included 42 courses. Phase 2, released in April 2013, added another 39 courses.
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.
University of Cambridge OCW language learning resources
The Language Centre of the University of Cambridge offers a range of Open Courseware (OCW) learning resources under the Creative Commons Licence.
Most of the OCW resources offered by the Language Centre were initially developed for the courses run as part of the Cambridge University Language Programme (CULP). The materials were designed for use in a blended learning environment combining ICT-based learning with face-to-face learning in the classroom.
The resources can be used for self-study, but for their most effective use they will benefit from a learning environment with some face-to-face contact.
Basic and intermediate Chinese, basic German and Russian essentials are currently available in the OCW language platform.
International Council for Open Research and Education (ICORE) to be launched in Rome
The International Council for Open Research and Education (ICORE) is a new association bringing together interested experts and stakeholders from the fields of open education and open research. The association will be officially launched on May 16 in Rome (Italy) during the Learning Innovations and Technology (LINQ 2013) conference.
ICORE is a non-profit and requires no membership fees to join. Open to both representatives of organisations as well as individuals, it aims to promote open research and open education as a fundamental social objective. This promotion of these goals will be accomplished through the fostering of collaboration between relevant stakeholders in open research and education, such as national, European and international policy makers, researchers, educators of all levels, students, non-profit educational providers as well as commercial educational providers, among others.
The association's activities will include the administration of an online community portal for information exchange, the organisation of scientific and educational events (conferences, summer schools, etc.) and the establishment of creative partnerships between ICORE members to advance open research and open education internationally.
Interested applicants can register easily at the ICORE website, where the complete first public draft of the association’s statutes can also be found. Joining before the first official meeting of ICORE on May 15 allows new members to be recognized as co-founders.