Open Education 2013

Since its inception, the open education space has been fragmented by intellectual property differences, a lack of easy-to-use tools, a desire for ownership, and a simple way to brand content. Despite the proliferation of open educational projects, the promise of OER ? the ability to easily remix to innovate ? has not been unlocked. In order to make remixing easy, we must move beyond mere openness to active sharing. New tools and standard formats have been designed to make creating and sharing OER easy.

In this session, our panel will investigate barriers to broader sharing from both faculty and institutional perspectives. We will delve into concerns around commercialization, lack of a central clearinghouse for OER, and OER quality and vetting practices.

We will also take a first look at the new version of the Connexions OER authoring and sharing platform. This new platform, created in partnership with Google, promises to make frictionless remix a reality by combining easy to use authoring tools, state-of-the-art transformation services that automatically generate a myriad of output formats including publisher-quality PDFs and ePubs for use on tablets.

Finally, we will also explore the idea of a "federated OER ecosystem" where individual institutions retain total control over their OER platform, but have the ability to push or pull open content to or from a shared central archive.