E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

In de week van 5 tot 10 maart wordt de eerste wereldwijde Open Education Week georganiseerd. Het doel van de week is om meer bekendheid te geven aan de voordelen van het open delen binnen het onderwijs en dan specifiek open leermaterialen. Tijdens de week organiseren meer dan 120 organisaties wereldwijd evenementen, zowel offline als online. Alle evenementen zijn natuurlijk gratis en open voor iedereen.

Natuurlijk doen wij hier in Nederland hier ook actief aan mee en dan vooral OpenUniversiteit, Wikiwijs, Surf en de TU Delft. Enkele evenementen die wij organiseren of een bijdrage aan leveren:

• Lancering OER-trendrapport op 5 maart
  De Special Interest Group Open Educational Resources (OER) heeft twaalf Nederlandse OER-experts (daar ben ik er één van) gevraagd een artikel te schrijven over trends op hun vakgebied. Op maandagochtend 5 maart verschijnen deze artikelen gebundeld in het OER-trendrapport 2012 op SURFspace.
  
  
• Mediacall 5 maart Why Open Education Matters
  Er wordt een mediacall georganiseerd in de VS. Hier kunnen journalisten op inbellen en krijgen ze van de verschillende sprekers een introductie en vervolgens gelegenheid om vragen te stellen. De deelnemers aan de call zijn Martha Kanter (Under Secretary of Education in VS), Cable Green (Director Global Learning Creative Commons) Richard Baraniuk (founder Connexions, Rice University) en Anka Mulder (Secretaris van TU Delft en President of OpenCourseWare Consortium)
  
  
• Open Education Week Event in Delft op 7 maart
  Dit evenement organiseer ik zelf en heb ik hier al over geblogd.
  
  
• Webinar 'Social Entrepreneurship Learning' op donderdag 8 maart
  Tijdens dit webinar vertelt Jos Rikers (Open Universiteit) over het Social Entrepreneurship project, dat hoogwaardige open leermaterialen over ondernemerschapsvaardigheden wil ontwikkelen, en gaat hij met de deelnemers in gesprek over de aanpak.
  
  
• Workshop ‘Wikiwijs en het hoger onderwijs: wat wil de docent?’ op 9 maart
  Tijdens deze workshop maakt u kennis met Wikiwijs, het online platform waarop docenten open leermaterialen kunnen vinden, maken en delen. De wensen en ideeën van de deelnemers zijn input voor de doorontwikkeling van Wikiwijs. meer informatie en inschrijven

Wereldwijd zijn er nog veel meer evenementen, kijk hiervoor op de website van de Open Education Week. Komend weekend komt de nieuwe website online met alle evenementen erop.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is organising the first annual Open Education Week from March 5 – 10, 2012. Open Education Week is a global event, raising awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially Open Educational Resources (OER).  OER are high-quality, free and open educational materials that offer opportunities for people anywhere in the world to share, use and reuse.

“The vision of the open education movement is to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere, is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire. “The movement encompasses producing, sharing, using and modifying content, as well as innovative models of educational delivery,” said Anka Mulder, President of the OpenCourseWare Consortium.  “Open Education Week will showcase projects, resources, people and ideas so that people around the world can see the breadth of what has been accomplished already, and participate in discussions about the future of the movement.”

Delft University of Technology, SURF and Open Universiteit in the Netherlands strongly support Open Education Week and organize an event for policy makers within Higher Education in Europe.

We would like to invite you to attend this event on March 7^th in the Aula of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Speakers are Anka Mulder (President of the OpenCourseWare Consortium), Halbe Zijlstra (Dutch State Secretary for Education), Lieve Van der Brande (European Commission, DG Education and Culture), Greetje van den Bergh (Chair Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO), Arnold Jonk (Director Knowledge of Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture & Science), Fred Mulder (UNESCO Chair in OER at Open Universiteit and Chair Steering Committee Wikiwijs) and Neelie Kroes (European Commissioner)

More information and registration for this event: http://opencourseware.eu/OpenEducationEvent2012.

A great article from David Wiley, Cable Green and Louis Soares: Dramatically Bringing Down the Cost of Education with OER

We are in the midst of a revolution in education. For the first time in human history we have the tools to enable everyone to attain all the education they desire. And best of all this education is available at almost no cost.

The key to this sea change in learning is open education resources, or OER. OER are educational materials produced by one party that are licensed to be used free of charge by others. OER come in many forms—from curriculum to homework assignment to textbooks. And OER exist for all levels of education, from kindergarten through college.

OER are starting to hit the public consciousness in the form of initiatives like the Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseware, and Washington’s Open Course Library. At the end of January, California lawmakers proposed legislation that would create a digital library of free college textbooks that could save the state’s college students millions of dollars each year in education costs.

OER are already being used by learners for self study, by teachers to enhance classroom learning, and by education providers to bring down the cost of instruction. Clearly, open education resources hold some of the answers to maintaining the quality of learning material while significantly reducing the cost of education.

With this brief we seek to provide a substantive understanding of OER and at the same time inform the emerging public debate over their use in public education. It’s clear to us that OER must be part of the broader conversation concerning spiraling education costs and the need to make education more accessible and affordable at all levels.

Finally we provide key suggestions for how policymakers can best structure the use of OER. Most immediately, we urge federal, state, and local governments and educational institutions to adopt a simple public policy: “All publicly funded resources are openly licensed resources.”

You can download the article here (PDF) or read it online (Scribd).

Online College Courses Blog has made a nice infographics about the state of OpenCourseWare.

Last night I was invited by the European Internet Foundation to speak at a Diner Debat about OpenData. There were 3 speakers:

• Marcus Dapp, IT strategist for the city government of Munich and board member OKF Germany at Open Knowledge Foundation.
• Richard Swetenham, European Commission, Head of Unit - Access to Information (E4) DG Information Society.
• Willem van Valkenburg, director of Delft University of Technology OpenCourseWare, project manager of OpenCourseWare Europe and assistant to the President of OpenCourseWare Consortium.

De meeting was chaired by ELDR MEP Marietje Schaake. The meeting was attended by about 70 people: MEPs (or their assistant), EC staff, companies (Microsoft, Dell, eBay, Ericsson, Facebook) and lobbyists.

The speakers all got 8 minutes to speak. That is very short. Below is the presentation that was used as base for my speech:

After the speakers the audience could ask questions and we answered. It was an interesting debat and I got positive feedback for more OER and OCW in Europe.

The podcast of my speech is her te listen:

Yesterday Sebastian Thrun announced that he is starting a new Open Education platform Udacity.com. Last year he was the initiator for the succesful open classes on Artifical Intellegence with more than 150.000 students.

The first course they will launch is on making a web search engine. In seven weeks you should be able to make a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!

In his announcements speech he had a great quote for all of us:

“If we can make education free and accessible for the world, we can achieve things we never thought possible.”

I trully believe this and that is why TU Delft is publishing OpenCourseWare courses and very active in the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

Audrey Watters wrote a nice blog about this on hack education.

Open content licensing for educators is a free online workshop designed for educators and students who want to learn more about open education resources, copyright, and creative commons licenses.

The course materials were developed as a collaborative project by volunteers from the OER Foundation, WikiEducator, the OpenCourseWare Consortium and Creative Commons with funding support from UNESCO. The course will provide prerequisite knowledge required by educators to legally remix open education materials and help institutions to take informed decisions about open content licenses.

The workshop is scheduled for 23 - 27 January 2012. Participants will need approximately 1 hour for each day of the workshop at a time which suits your own schedule.

More information and registration can be found here: wikieducator.org/OCL4ED

In 2011 heb ik 78 blogitems geschreven op deze blog, inclusief deze (daarnaast heb ik ook nog meer dan 5000 tweets verstuurd). Hieronder een Wordle van de titels van al die items:

Het is wel duidelijk waar dit jaar mijn aandacht naar toe ging. Dat heeft natuurlijk ook te maken met mijn nieuw functie.

De top 10 van beste bekeken items uit 2011 geeft ook een mooi overzicht van waar ik me mee bezig houd op de TU Delft:

1. Blackboard Security bijeenkomst (28 januari)
2. College van Sugata Mitra (7 januari)
3. Twitter als leertool voor chirurgen (11 februari)
4. Results of TU Delft Mobile Survey 2011 (9 september)
5. Tablets nemen de pc-markt over (19 februari)
6. TU Delft is leading the OpenCourseWare Consortium (6 mei)
7. OpenCourseWare and Standards (16 februari)
8. Stoppen met Blackboard (14 juni)
9. Standaarden voor OER (25 januari)
10. BbTLC11: Supercharging the Blackboard notification system (13 april)

Als je meerekent hoe lang een post online staatn, dan is het bericht over de resultaten van de TU Delft Mobile Survey 2011 het meest gelezen.

Andreia Inamoratodos Santos has written an interesting report about Open Educational Resources (OER) in Brazil. The government has set ambitious goals for education in Brazil and OER can certainly help to reach those goals.

Andreia states that the concept of OER in Brasil demands a lot more dissemination and practical implementation actions by the government and both public and private education sectors in order to harness the potential of OER to support the achievement of the national education goals.

Below is the complete report with also interesting case studies.

Deze week lanceerde MIT iets nieuws, namelijk MITx:

MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

• • organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
  • feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
  • allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
  • operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

In de lokale campuskrant staat een uitgebreid interview met de projectleider.

Het is een interessante ontwikkeling en ben heel benieuwd om met mijn OpenCourseWare-collega's van MIT hier meer over te horen. Het initiatief roept veel vragen op en niet alleen bij mij:

• Audrey Watters
• Brandon Muramatsu
• Mark Smithers

Persoonlijk vind ik dit een mooi initiatief en sluit ook aan bij wat wij op de TU Delft willen doen met OpenCourseWare en Online Education-programma.