E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Exactly 10 years ago, on 16^th of October 2007, we launched the website ocw.tudelft.nl (see my blog post). We started with 10 courses from 3 master programmes. 10 years later we have 200 courses on the site and many more initiative that happened because of OpenCourseWare, such as iTunesU, our MOOCs on edX, our open & online education programme, our open science programme. Below a short video we made for the celebration.

From the beginning I have been involved with the project and looking back I'm very proud of the impact we have had with small OpenCourseWare project. Not only outside the university for learners around the world, but also within the university. Check out our special page we created to give an overview of 10 years of OpenCourseWare.

University Policy

In the last couple of years we have been working hard to embed open education in the core of the university. Part of this is sustaining it in our university policies. This means that it is included in TU Delft's Vision on Education. The document describes our educational goals and quality ambitions, and states directions for further development of our educational portfolio and our way of teaching and learning. The document states:

As an open academic community we see it as part of our public mission to:

• Share latest insights from our research with our students, alumni, working professionals and learners all over the world and become a learning community in which we learn and collaborate to solve the challenges of our time
• Share our courses and course materials with a global public by publishing them under an open license that allows re‐use for non‐commercial ends

The new institutional strategic framework will also include important statements about open education and open science. It will be finalised later this year.

What's next?

in the short term some celebration during the Open Education Week in March. The big event next year will be the Open Education Global Conference we are organising together with Open Education Consortium. You have one week left to submit a proposal!

In the long we continue to support our academic staff to opening up the education and research. Open should become the default for our researchers and teachers.

Today we launched the conference website for the Open Education Global Conference 2018 in Delft. The theme of the Open Education Global 2018 Conference is Transforming Education through Open Approaches.

This theme is a result of many discussion within the programme committee (Robert Schuwer is the chair of the committee) and I think it reflects very well the global development how education is transforming. The open approaches are not limited to education, it includes the broader perspective of openness. This aligns with the Year of Open strategy of bringing together all the different kinds of openness, suc as open science, open access, open data, open ict, open education, open research and more.

Call for Proposals

The website includes the Call for Proposals including the conference tracks:

• Open Connections 
  Connecting different worlds of Open, such as open access, open science, open source software; strengthening our reach and increasing impact through collaboration.

• Open Education Research
  Research on practices to mainstream openness in education; evidence of impact, studies of educational transformation using open modalities.  

• Innovation through opening traditional practices
  MOOCs as an accelerator for open & online education, opening teaching practices through open textbooks, openly licensed student work as OER.

• Policies & strategies for Open Education
  Setting priorities and conditions for mainstreaming Open Education, designing effective policies and strategies, connecting open education policies to larger policy movements such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Open Government Partnership.

• Institutionalizing Open Education
  Intellectual property arrangements at schools and universities; reward and recognition systems; institutional conventions; disciplinary norms; types of in-service training for Open Education; impact on hiring practices; challenges and barriers for mainstreaming openness; openness as a tool for community outreach, enhancing leadership in open education.

• Tools & Technologies for Open Education
  Supporting the development and use of tools for OER production, hosting, use and remix, authoring OER, conventions for tagging OER, hosting derivative works, citation conventions for derivative works, standards for remixable formats.

• Open Educational Practices/Open Pedagogy
  New approaches to teaching and learning based on openness, personalization of education, OER-enhanced teaching, facilitating informal learning with open resources, course redesign with a focus on open.

• Connecting Open Education to formal education
  Accelerating adoption of open education, recognition and rewards for open education adoption, alignment of open education values to institutional mission, accreditation of open education, recognition of learning through open means.

• Student perspectives
  Student-led initiatives to advance open education and research, impact of open for students, student perceptions of open education, students as open education leaders.

The deadline for submitting proposal is 23rd of October. I hope to see many great proposals from around the world. Check out the conference website for more information.

Last week it was Open Education Week. Many people world wide participated in local and online events during the week. We hope it inspired you for Open Education. Next month is the Open Education Global Conference were you learn more about Open Education and join the global movement in Open Education.

The Open Education Global Conference is the annual opportunity for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and educators to deeply explore open education and its impact on global education.

Conference participants learn from thought leaders in open education and have the opportunity to share ideas, practices and discuss issues important to the future of education worldwide. Sessions cover new developments in open education, research results, innovative technology, policy development and implementation, and practical solutions to challenges facing education around the world. The Open Education Global Conference 2016 will take place in Kraków, Poland from the 12th to 14th of April 2016. The theme of the Open Education Global Conference 2016 is Convergence Through Collaboration.

TU Delft's Vice President Education and former President of the consortium Anka Mulder will be one of the keynote speakers. Martijn Ouwehand and me we also attend the conference and we will participate in a couple of sessions. I hope to see you there!

The staff of the Open Education Consortium has created a great overview of the activities of the Open Education Consortium. The overview gives interesting numbers of the Open Education Week 2015, the Global Conference in Banff, ,member & community services and other projects and activities.

One of the interesting overviews are alle the trainings, workshops and presentations the OEC staff and board members conducted in 2015. More info on the website.

Take a look at the great overview of our activities and visit the website.

This week I'm in the beautiful town of Banff in the state of Alberta (Canada) for the Open Education Global Conference 2015. This is the yearly conference organised by the Open Education Consortium. As board member I have to be present at this conference, but that is never a burden.

It always is a busy conference for me. Next to the conference we also have the board meeting of the consortium. This year Meena also tricked me in some workshops. So you have multiple opportunities to see me in action.

Pre-conference workshop
On Tuesday we start with a pre-conference workshop on getting started with Open Education. Together with Robert Schuwer, Martijn Ouwehand, Jure Cuhalev and Meena Whang I will organise a full day workshop. This conference will be based on the workshop we organised last year as part of the OpenCourseWare Europe project.

Action Lab MOOCs
On Friday I'm organising an 'Action Lab' about everything you want to know about MOOCs. In this one hour session I will try to answer all the questions the participants have on the production and delivery of MOOCs.

Awards
This year the TU Delft has won three awards:

• Outstanding course: The Human Controller (David Abbink)
• Open MOOC: Delft Design Approach (Jaap Daalhuizen)
• Open MOOC: Solving Complex Problems (Alexander de Haan)
  

The project manager of the Design mooc is here at the conference, so she will pick up this award. The other two Martijn and I will pick up on behalf of David and Alexander.

Banner Image: CC-BY-SA Karl Johnson

Last night was the Awards Ceremony of the OpenCourseWare Open Education Consortium. This year TU Delft was  privileged to receive 4 awards.

The first award was a personal award for Anka Mulder. She received the Leadership award for her commitment for open education, TU Delft is now achieving the ideal of open education both in the Netherlands and internationally.

The second award was an outstanding site award for our OpenCourseWare website. Martijn Ouwehand received the award. He is responsible for our website.

The last two awards we received for our first two MOOCs, Solar Energy and Introduction to Water Treatment. On behave of both teachers, Arno Smets and Jules van Lier, I received the awards.

Below are the photos of our awards. More photos of the event, can be found on my flickr page.

Today at the OCW Consortium Global Conference in Ljubljana, the OpenCourseWare Consortium announced a name change to Open Education Consortium with the tagline "The Global network for Open Education". The new name better reflects the current activities of the Consortium and the interest of many institutions.

The Open Education Consortium (www.openedconsortium.org) envisions a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so anywhere in the world, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.  The Open Education Consortium acts to expand access to education and promote open sharing of knowledge. It does this by leveraging its sources of expert opinion, its global network and its position as the principal voice of open education.

Everyone in the OER world nows the 4R model of David Wiley. David has created the 4Rs  for the purpose of helping people understand and remember the key rights that open content licenses grant them. Last month, after seven years, he introduced an improved version of the 4R model. The 5th R stands for Retain: the right to make, own, and control copies of the content. The reason to add the R is that more and more resources are limited in the time you can use them. David writes about this:

Last month I wrote about “disappearing ink,” a way of characterizing the way that post-secondary institutions are trying to increase the affordability of required textbooks by decreasing student access to them. Specifically, campuses have initiated a number of programs like textbook buyback, textbook rental, digital subscription programs, and DRM-laden ebook programs, each of which results in students completely losing access to their required textbooks at the end of term. The more I’ve pondered the disappearing ink strategy, the more it has bothered me. I can understand commercial publishers acting in a way that favors business over learning, but not our campuses.

 Although this 5th R is implied in the others (at least 3 of the original 4Rs are impossible to do without the right to Retain), it hasn't been addressed directly in the discussion about open licensing. You could see Retain as a fundamental right.

The 5Rs of Openness

• Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
• Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video) 
• Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

I think Retain is a very good addition in times that we still have to fight for openness. Although openness is getting more attention, it is still not the default in education what it should be. Education is sharing, but most of the times you are not allowed to do that!

Op 11 maart, tijdens de Open Education Week, heeft het symposium Open en Online Education plaats gevonden in Utrecht. Het symposium is georganiseerd door SURF, het ministerie van OCW, de VSNU en de Vereniging Hogescholen.

Er is inmiddels een uitgebreid verslag beschikbaar. Verder zijn er van een heel aantal sessies video-registraties beschikbaar:

• Keynote Open leren door Erik Duval, KU Leuven
• Paneldiscussie
• Hordenloop naar open en online onderwijs, Wilfred Rubens & Robert Schuwer (Open Universiteit)
• Leiden Delft Erasmus - Online onderwijs: regionale samenwerking en internationale strategie, Anka Mulder (TUDelft) & Simone Buitendijk (Universiteit Leiden)
• MOOC’s als bron van inspiratie en innovatie, Marja Verstelle en Edwin Bakker (Universiteit Leiden)
• Stappen op weg naar open inline onderwijs, Pierre Gorissen (Fontys)

Van de meeste presentaties zijn de powerpoints beschikbaar op de surf-website.

Alweer de derde editie van het trendrapport geschreven door de SIG Open Education. De vorige edities hadden nog als titel "Trendrapport OER". Deze editie hebben we aangepast naar Open Education. Dit past in een wereldwijde trend en geeft beter aan waar het trendrapport over gaat:

Dit Trendrapport Open Education 2014 beschrijft de trends op het gebied van open education in binnen- en buitenland, geschreven vanuit de context van het Nederlandse hoger onderwijs. Dat gebeurt aan de hand van acht artikelen van Nederlandse experts op het gebied van open en online onderwijs en acht korte intermezzo’s.
Het Trendrapport Open Education 2014 is een uitgave van de special interest group Open Education van SURF. De special interest group faciliteert en bevordert communityvorming, kennisontwikkeling, kennisdeling, samenwerking en visievorming rondom open leermaterialen en open onderwijs binnen het hoger onderwijs in Nederland. Activiteiten van de special interest group worden gecoördineerd door een kernteam van experts uit de instellingen. De special interest group is dus van én voor het hoger onderwijs, en wordt ondersteund door SURF.

Het trendrapport is te downloaden op www.surf.nl/trendrapportopeneducation2014. Daar vindt u ook een link naar de Engelstalige versie.

Het rapport bevat de volgende hoofdstukken:

• POSTINITIEEL OPEN EN ONLINE HOGER ONDERWIJS:  HET PERSPECTIEF VAN DEELNEMER, wERKGEVER, OPLEIDER EN ONDERWIJSPROFESSIONAL
  door Nicolai van der Woert, Ria van ’t Klooster, Mark Visser en Jody Hoekstra
• OPEN FOR BUSINESS?
  door Matthijs Leendertse en Jop Esmeijer
• ERKENNING VAN MOOC’S IN HET ONDERWIJS
  door Marja Verstelle, Marije Schreuder en Hester Jelgerhuis
• TOETSEN EN BEOORDELEN BINNEN MOOC’S
  door Meta Keijzer-de Ruijter en Sofia Dopper
• INTEGRATIE EN HERGEBRUIK VAN OPEN EDUCATION IN HET FORMELE ONDERWIJS
  door Martijn Ouwehand en Ria Jacobi
• OPEN EDUCATION, BIG DATA EN LEARNING ANALYTICS
  door Sander Latour en Robert Schuwer
• MOOC’S: DE KANSEN EN GEVAREN VOLGENS STUDENTEN
  door Marianne Kaufman en Tim van den Brink
• OPEN EDUCATION EN JURIDISCHE VRAAGSTUKKEN: TRENDS EN ONTWIKKELINGEN
  door Esther Hoorn en Robert Schuwer

Daarnaast bevat het rapport een heel aantal intermezzo's:

• My (open) education app
• MOOC-platforms
• Open education en het semantische web
• Databronnen over open education en MOOC’s
• Publicaties
• Universiteit van Nederland
• Open education en academic ranking
• XYOC: varianten op MOOC’s

Het rapport bevat een aantal duidelijke trends voor Open Education:

• als aanjager voor het verbeteren van de onderwijskwaliteit
• als aanjager voor flexibilisering in het onderwijs
• als aanjager voor een leven lang leren
• als aanjager voor samenwerken
• als aanjager voor ‘unbundling’
• als aanjager voor discussie rondom erkennen van online onderwijs

Al met al is dit weer een uitstekend trendrapport en ik raad iedereen aan om dit te lezen.