26.1 Evolution to education 3.0  (Page 6/19)

Our chancellor is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who I am sure you will all recognize as an uncompromising champion of freedom. He has personally signed the Cape Town Declaration as well. You can here him talk about freedom in the digital age at

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Perhaps they will help explain where we come from.

Unfortunately, our growth in production of OERs has not been commiserate with our stance YET for a number of reasons. However, we believe that collaboration among students is the key to at least one aspect of it. Thus we have the Rip, Mix and Learn project, which has students producing content as part of their own learning, and making it available to the next crop of students. This is FORE in a social constructivist scenario, much of OER is instructivist lead.

But there is a role for that as well. In the second semester, we go live with our new learning management system, which will automatically make all of our course materials available under a CC: BY-SA license. We are also starting a podcast project that will see lectures automatically podcasted from the classroom (where the lecturer chooses to do so), and by next year, this will be in all our classrooms, thus potentially making all our lectures available under this license.

Sorry, rambling while eating my granola and yoghurt, but hope these comments are useful, Will respond to the other two posts during the course of the day.

Regards, derek

8. ken udas - june 3rd, 2008 at 6:42 am

Wow, thanks for the great post and comments. I want to point back to Derek’s provocative statement about accrediting Open Education Resources, and push Leigh’s questions a bit further.

When we talk about “accrediting” open educational resources, what do we mean?

I am assuming that is has something to do with assuring quality. I suppose that there are a whole lot of quality assurance models in education. Many governments become involvement with quality assurance through public agencies, there are also regional and professional accreditation processes that strive to ensure institutional and curricular quality. I suppose that most colleges and universities have internal processes in which they “accredit” learning materials, but I think that it is usually pretty contextual. That is, factors such as teaching methods, characteristics of learners, level of the course within an overall curriculum, educational commitments of the institution, department, and faculty are taken into account together and not disaggregated. In many settings this happens within a college, department, and/or at the individual level f the faculty member – not so much by individual students. That said, in the bigger picture, I suppose that individual learners do make decisions based on their perceptions of quality and value.

In any event, it seems that it is perhaps a bit inappropriate to “accredit” Open Educational Resources in the same way that we quality assure academic programs or course instances. It seems to me though that there are characteristics that have little to do with the “content” in terms of its accuracy, relevance, logic, meaning, etc, but does have to do with other important qualities such as ability easily find, access, use, modify, and reuse the OER. Are these qualities that might be assured or at least described?