E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

This fall, SURF Academy is organising a masterclass Open Educational Resources (OER). During the masterclass you will get to know everything about Open Education, OER, MOOCs and more. The masterclass is for teachers and staff of  higher education institutes and will be in Dutch. The masterclass will be a combination of three face-to-face meetings and online collaboration.

SURF Academy is organising this masterclass in close cooperation between the SURF Special Interest Group OER. The speakers of the masterclass are experts from the SIG, such as Robert Schuwer and Martijn Ouwehand.

If you want to get started with publishing OER or using OER, I think the masterclass would really help you. More information about the masterclass is available on the website of SURF Academy.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium launched a survey on their website in March 2011 to collect user feedback. Data was gathered from 1773 respondents from nearly 90 countries. The results are now available on their website.

In addition, the have collected and consolidated user surveys from the OCW Consortium, Tufts University, Education-Portal.com, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-Online) and Delft University of Technology into a user feedback report. The report, which incorporates results from the OCWC Feedback Survey, can be downloaded here (PDF).

44% of respondents indicate that OCW materials help them with the concepts they are studying. 51% also use these materials for specific projects, or to supplement or even create teaching materials. Of particular interest is the fact that 51% of respondents find OCW materials useful in order to update their skills or knowledge for and at work. In addition, 54% reported having found OCW materials useful for their own interests.

For our OpenCourseWare Europe we are organising an workshop on OpenCourseWare and Student Mobility. The main goal of this two-day event is to showcase and discuss scenarios and guidelines with regard to how OpenCourseWare (OCW) can facilitate student virtual mobility in the European Higher Education context.

Removal of barriers to mobility in Higher Education has been identified, by the European Union, as one of its strategic priorities. This two-day event is organized within the context of a project entitled OpenCourseWare in the European Higher Education Context: How to make use of its full potential for virtual mobility, which is supported through the Life Long Learning Programme of the European Union. The main aim of this project is to showcase practices, develop scenarios and recommendations for successful implementation of OCW with an aim to improve student virtual mobility.

Join us for this interactive two-day event to learn how OCW can benefit Higher Education Institutions, teachers and students in order to facilitate student virtual mobility.

The workshop is on 11 and 12 June at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The workshop is free to attend, but you have to register via our website.

At the OCWC Global Conference two courses of TU Delft OpenCourseWare have received a OCWC CourseWare award. These awards recognize outstanding course materials in two categories, Video & Multimedia and Text & Illustrations.  Five awards will be given in each category.

Delft Design Guide received the award in the Text & Illustrations category. Introduction to Aerospace Engineering I received the award in the category Video & Multimedia.

The credits go to the responsible teachers. For Delft Design Guide that are Annemiek van Boeijen en Jaap Daalhuizen en for Aerospace Engineering it is Jacco Hoekstra.

Today I got elected as board member of OCW Consortium on behave of Delft University of Technology. It is a great honour to be board member for the Consortium. I have attended many board meeting since 2008, but now I'm also allowed to vote.

The Consortium is the only international un-biased organisation on open education. Especially in times that a lot of people are talking about open education (they call them moocs), it is important that there is an organisation that keeps emphasizing OPENNESS.

MOOCs without openness are just education and this won't bring us much further in our mission to increase the access to education worldwide.

Anka Mulder is officially stepping down as President and board member of the Consortium. After 5 years her 3 terms have ended. She will stay involved with Open Education at Delft University of Technology.

Li Yuan and Stephen Powell from JISC CETIS have written an interesting white paper on MOOCs and Open Education. The goal of the authors is to help decision makers in higher education institutions gain a better understanding of MOOCs and trends towards greater openness and the implications for their institutions.

Although the paper is focused on UK institutions this is als for others an interesting read. They raise a lot of interesting questions, issues and challenges.

I fully support their conclusions:

Open education brings new opportunities for innovation in higher education that will allow institutions and academics to explore new online learning models and innovative practices in teaching and learning. At a national and international level, new frameworks for HE funding structures, quality insurance and accreditation to support different approaches and models for delivering higher education will be required. Policy makers will need to embrace openness and make education more affordable and accessible for all and at the same time be profitable for the institutions in an open higher education ecosystem.

Via: Wilfred Rubens (in Dutch)

Yesterday the Guardian featured an article from Anka Mulder about the OCW4STEM project we submitted in January:

Technology is fundamentally reshaping how we work, socialise and communicate, but too few European students are opting to study the subjects that will give them the skills to work in our innovation-led economy. This is a particular problem for women, minorities and other non-traditional student groups.

STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects are declining in popularity at a rapid rate across all European countries, signalling a macro-crisis for future economic competitiveness and more personal micro-crisis among Europe's engineering and technology universities.

Read the article on their website.

Last week Audrey Watters blogged about the question "What has the impact been of MOOCs on MIT OCW usage?". The answer from Steve Carson:

The site has seen ?record levels of traffic? since the MOOC craze began: 22.3 million visitors in 2012, up 25% over 2011.

We notice the same thing on ocw.tudelft.nl. Our number of visits has increased with 77% in 2012 in comparison to 2011. Especially in the 4th quarter of 2012 (Europe is always a little behind the US) our daily number of visitors increased from 550 to 800 . This grow continues in 2013, although we had some negative impact because of our university cookie wall.

I see the interest in MOOCs as really positive for the Open Education Ecosystem. All university boards are talking about it and that also leads to more attention towards OpenCourseWare and Open Educational Resources.

For my university we are also looking at the combination of OCW and MOOCs. We have decided to publish our MOOCs via EdX with an open license. To maximise exposure we will also publish the course materials of the moocs on our OpenCourseWare website. The content that is created in our MOOCs will also be used in our online master programmes and in our regular campus education.

So we are putting money in creating awesome content, but we are using the content everywhere we can.

Gisteren was het evenement dat ik samen met Hester Jelgerhuis (SURF) en Robert Schuwer (OU NL) heb georganiseerd in het kader van de Open Education Week.

Het hele evenement werd live gestreamd. Deze video's staan nu ook online. Op het youtube-kanaal van SURF zijn deze allemaal terug te zien. Ook is er een foto-serie van het evenement.

Trendrapport
Belangrijk onderdeel van het programma was de presentatie van het Trendrapport 2013. We kregen ervoor veel positieve reacties. Grote dank gaat uit naar Hester, Ria Jacobi en Nicolai van der Woert voor de redactie.

OER Studentendebat
Het laatste onderdeel van de dag was het OER studentendebat. Helaas viel het aantal aanwezige studenten tegen (TU-studenten lieten het ook afweten), daardoor hebben we discussie gedaan met de hele zaal in een Lagerhuis opstelling. Het debat werd geleid door de Utrecht Debating Society. Het debat kwam wat moeizaam op gang, maar uiteindelijk vond ik dit wel een zeer geslaagd onderdeel van het programma.

Yesterday the OER Trend Report 2013 of the Dutch special interest group for Open Educational Resources has been published:

The Trend Report: Open Educational Resources 2013 describes trends in open educational resources (OER) and open education in the Netherlands and elsewhere, from the perspective of Dutch higher education.

It comprises fifteen articles by Dutch experts in the field of open and online education. It also includes 15 short  ?Intermezzos? giving high-profile examples. The report is published by the Open Educational Resources Special Interest Group (SIG OER) supported by SURF.

The report is available in Dutch and English. The Dutch version is also available as online book and iOS app.

Tomorrow during the Open Education Event in Utrecht there will be a market where most of the authors will present their chapter and are available for questions. I will be there for questions about MOOCs.