March 7-11 is Open Education Week, a worldwide event sponsored by the Open Education Consortium to raise awareness about open education and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide.
University of Delaware faculty and staff are invited to participate in a variety of online and on-campus events during this week. All campus events will be held at Faculty Commons, 116 Pearson Hall.
The open education movement is focused on affordable access to education. It promotes the creation, remix and redistribution of learning materials — for example, videos, podcasts, music, articles, images or textbooks — through open licenses, such as those available through Creative Commons.
Open education also promotes the use of Internet resources and social media to take students’ learning experience beyond the classroom walls — to encourage enriching and authentic dialogue while also making educational resources more available globally. Because materials can be more easily accessed and downloaded, the cost of spreading information has become essentially free.
How can UD faculty and staff participate in Open Education Week?
Faculty Commons will host local events to promote open education to UD faculty, staff, and students. Highlights of this year’s events at UD include the following:
- Tuesday, March 8, 1 p.m.: Discover SkillsCommons.org, the repository for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program. Explore the vast Open Educational Resources (OER) being produced by 700 community colleges across the United States and how they can be found, reused, revised, retained and redistributed by individuals, institutions, and industry. Learn how the CC BY Creative Commons license on SkillsCommons materials provides opportunities for other institutions, employers and other users to reuse the materials in a variety of ways to create “derivative works” that could better serve the needs of different learners in different contexts with different technologies.
- Tuesday, March 8, 2 p.m.: OER Treasure Hunt. So you’ve heard of open educational resources (OER), but you don’t know where to start? Bring your computer at the Faculty Commons and IT Academic Technologies Services (ATS) staff will assist you in finding open learning materials for your courses.
- Wednesday, March 9, 1:30 p.m.: Beyond Textbooks. The Campus Alberta Open Educational Resources Initiative is designed to assist with reducing the costs of a post-secondary education for students; and, provide students and faculty members with the flexibility they need, offering updated, relevant content for learning. With awarded projects focused on three categories of Awareness, Content Use / Development and Sustainability, the initiative has aimed to support projects which “look beyond textbooks” by integrating open resources related to interactive learning, assessment, and, building capacity within institutions for future OER adoptions. This webinar will share lessons learned from the initiative to empower others to move forward with their own OER adoption projects, not limited to textbooks but OERs as a whole.
- Thursday, March 10, 9:30 a.m.: FEATURED WEBINAR – An Open Repository for Problem-Based Learning. Instructors involved with Problem Based Learning (PBL) will share their tips and tricks, and promote the new PBL Clearinghouse to attract new adopters of PBL and potential contributors. Presented by Mark Serva, Accounting and IT Management Information Systems (MIS).
Thursday, March 10, 11 a.m.: The Power of Open: SUNY Open Education Initiatives. A webinar discussion that will bring together faculty, librarians and other members of the SUNY community who are actively involved in delivering open courseware and open textbooks.
Friday, March 11, 9 a.m.: Open Education Coffee Hour. An open discussion about open education, affordability and open teaching. Refreshments and snacks provided. - Friday, March 11, 10 a.m.: OER Treasure Hunt. So you’ve heard of open educational resources (OER), but you don’t know where to start? Bring your computer at the Faculty Commons and IT-ATS staff will assist you in finding open learning materials for your courses.
Participation in all on-campus and online Open Education Week events is free and open to anyone. For questions about the week’s events or open education in general, contact Faculty Commons at faculty-commons@udel.edu or (302)831-0640. More information is available on the University of Delaware’s Open Education Week 2016 micro-site.
UDaily Open Education week article
