On Oct. 30-31, members of the global open educational resources (OER) community will present their research into the challenges of sustaining and facilitating the movement at the OpenLearn 2007 conference in Milton Keynes, UK. Hosted by the Open University, the conference has four main themes: research agenda, sustainability, user experience, and software and tools. The overreaching aim of the conference is to “help establish the importance of research for this growing area and bring together the community of researchers,” specifically shedding light on the research agenda, tools, research results and models that are emerging from the OER movement.

Cynthia Jimes will present the case study of Free High School Science Texts (FHSST), a South African-based open content initiative that facilitates the online collaborative creation of high-school level science and math textbooks online. The presentation will also discuss the iCommons iCurriculum project more generally, and address the issue of assessing project successes and challenges and creating a framework and knowledge-base among open content projects toward continuous learning and OER sustainability.

Other presenters at the conference include, for example, Peter Batemen of Open University UK, who will discuss how a participatory architecture can make OER more accessible for African universities, and Susan D’Antoni of UNESCO, who will discuss a community-developed research agenda for OER. In drawing together OER community members from across the globe, the conference has the potential to provide a good venue for sharing and insights that can impact the iCommons iCurriculum Case Study Project.

 
For more information about the FHSST presentation, contact Cynthia Jimes at cynthia@iskme.org. For more about the OpenLearn conference, visit the conference website.

By Cynthia Jimes

On August 21-23, several open textbook project leaders, researchers, collaborators and open textbook publishers met at the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) to discuss how the development and use of open textbooks is best supported and sustained. At the meeting, which was hosted by the Hewlett Foundation and UC Irvine’s Distance Learning Center, there were presentations on open textbook projects, and on quality and technology issues within such projects. These included, for example, a demonstration of the textbook project Open Reference Mathematics, a presentation on balancing the needs of diverse open textbook communities, and a presentation of the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) case study project.

The FHSST case study, presented by Lisa Petrides, discussed several topics of relevance to open textbook sustainability, including the role of teachers and learners as co-creators of open textbook content, and the potential importance of hybrid models of peer production that simultaneously draw on face-to-face group work and online content authoring platforms. The FHSST presentation served as a concrete example that meeting participants drew upon during the remaining days’ dialogue—which focused on, among other things, defining an “open textbook” in light of teacher and learner needs, and the necessity of developing online spaces where teachers, learners and other users can interact and collaborate around textbook use and reuse possibilities.

The FHSST presentation slides, titled “The Case of Free High School Science Texts: Leveraging Community and Technology to Meet Local Teaching and Learning Needs”, can be downloaded in the resources section of iCommons from here.

If you have questions about the FHSST presentation, please contact Cynthia Jimes at cynthia@iskme.org.