Please visit our friends at CERI/OECD who are currently running a study on Open Educational Resources (OER) in tertiary education. The purpose of the study is to map the scale and scope of OER initiatives in terms of their purpose, content, and funding. It will also look into the technical and legal frameworks as well as cost/benefit models to sustain these initiatives.

The survey elicits quantitative and qualitative information from instructors and researchers using and/or producing open educational resources. If this applies to you, why not donate 10 minutes for a good cause?

Survey is here

What better way to teach a course on globalization than to broadcast it free of charge to anybody with an Internet connection, anywhere, at any time. The University of Lethbridge offers a course in Globalization Studies that does just that. Every Wednesday at 8PM EST, the lecture is streamed from their website. Past lectures are then archived as a podcast in your choice of format (Quicktime, an iPod formatted version or an audio only MP3 format) . Miss the lecture? Just download it to your iPod and catch-up while commuting the next day.

The course materials are licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Canada licence. This means that the lectures can be used, reused, and shared around the World in a noncommercial context and so long as the user properly attributes the source. And just like that, a small lecture theatre in Alberta welcomes an infinite audience.

Universities have embraced Creative Commons as a means of broadly distributing publicly subsidized content while retaining control over the copyright. The technology exists, the content is ready, and a Creative Commons licence makes it feasible. Consider using Creative Commons with your univesity’s research or coursewares and join a field including MIT, Rice University, Stanford and now the University of Lethbridge. May the educational commons prosper.