OER: SALSA - an open source syllabus builder

The open source, web-based SALSA (Styled & Accessible Learning Service Agreements) is a

syllabus authoring tool from Utah State University’s Center for Innovative Design & Instruction. It is based on the design of the PDF Syllabus Builder. No registration of any kind is required to use Salsa.

According to their website, Salsa generates a unique and random hyperlink for instructors. Instructors an bookmark or copy the hyperlink with the "My SALSA" button, and "use the hyperlink to return and edit their SALSA. Publish your SALSA to generate a new hyperlink to a "read-only" copy of your Salsa in PDF or HTML format."

I am interested in this because I think that this is another tool that can help instructors who have to work with learning outcomes to do it effectively and consistently. I prefer the kind of learning where the students decide what the outcomes might be around specific topics but even that kind of learning has a "meta-outcome" of being able to work with a group to develop course outcomes. And there are accrediting agencies that ask for them. SALSA uses Bloom's Taxonomy, built right into the tool, to help instructors author the outcomes.  I think it is helpful for students in a program to have some kind of consistency and connection of course outcomes with the class, the program, and the college.

This is also a way to get faculty and programs that need to work on student learning outcomes to see how they can be used in a practical way. If you have other tools for working with student learning outcomes, I would love an email or a note in the comments section.

Thanks!

Open Ed 13: A Red Hat for OER: Lumen's Journey

Kim Thanos and David Wiley talk about their business, Lumen Learning.

"After a decade and $100M US in foundation funding, an incredible amount of high quality open educational resources exist which are only rarely used in formal settings. The situation feels very much like it did with open source software a decade ago. At the turn of the century, almost everyone had heard of open source and was interested in potentially saving money and improving the stability and quality of their technology offerings, but very few institutions had either the bravery or the capacity to run systems for which there was no formal training and no technical support. Red Hat stepped into this vast pool of curiosity and caution with training, technical support, and other services that put adopting Linux within the reach of a normal institution.

Lumen is trying to do exactly same thing – step into the deep pool of curiosity and caution around open educational resources with the faculty training, academic leadership consulting, technical and pedagogical support, learning analytics services, and other pieces necessary to put adopting OER within reach of a normal institution. In the past year we've worked with dozens of secondary and post-secondary institutions and learned many - sometimes painful - lessons.

In this presentation we'll review our first year of lessons learned, including what works, what not to do, and how our business model has evolved over our first year."

Their 90/10 goal is to lower the cost by 90% and increase success by 10%. Success = C or better.

The OER are free but they charge for their time to come in and support the OER roll-out. 

60% of students do not purchase a textbook at one time because of cost.
23% never buy textbooks. 

Lumen wants 100% of the students to have access to free, digital materials from day one. They decided to go with .com like Flatworld Knowledge. It is a company because "their is not enough diversity" in the OER landscape. Their model is like MoodleRooms or rSmart. This is the "sustainability" question. 

Candela OER Services from Open Learning provide training, best practices for implementation, online and phone support, analytics, LMS integration, long term access to course data. Providing services to help institutions adopt and implement.

Courses

• Full math sequence
• Full dev ed
• Gen Ed and Business
• 65 highest enrolled courses in Gen Ed and business

Perils of the Business Model

• Transition from studetn budget to institutional budget
• Our absolutes, no pay wall, no raping and pillaging
• Our preferences - one time services as needed, but focus on sustained, supported improvements
• What is the right bundle?er enrollment? Per course? Per bundle?

Pricing models
Per course 2000k

Related articles

• Evidence of OER Impact #opened13 (oerresearchhub.org)
• Fall Semester OER Projects with Lumen Learning Yield $700,000 in Textbook Cost Savings for Students (downes.ca)
• Lumen Learning Update - Saving Students $700,000 Fall 2013 (opencontent.org)
• Lumen Learning: A Red Hat for OER (opencontent.org)

Open Ed 13: Using Open Badges adn an Open Course to Enhance & Extend Learning

 Daniel Randall, Buck Harrison, Dr. Richard West, and Garrett R. Hickman from Brigham Young University.

"We will present our design for an open badge system currently in use in an undergraduate technology course for education majors. Our design is an attempt to use badges and an open online course to not only enhance student learning but also to encourage continued learning once our course has ended.

Theoretical Background
Open badges can provide a credential for learning that occurs in a non-traditional setting, a space in which few institutions are providing credentials. This makes open badges a textbook example of a disruptive innovation. However, since badges can also be used in a traditional setting, universities and other traditional credentialing institutions can adapt by using open badges to enhance their current course offers and encourage lifelong learning in a non-traditional setting.

Design of our Badges
By creating and issuing open badges, we hoped to not only motivate students to meet higher standards of learning, but also encourage students to continue learning after completing the course and thus extend our students? learning beyond our one-credit course. To this end, our badge system is multi-tiered, open to students not currently enrolled at our institution, and is integrated into an open online version of the course.

Inspired by Mozilla?s ?constellations? from the early designs for their webmaker.org badge system, we decided to graphically organize and group together the various technologies students could choose to learn. Our system had three different levels of badges. The lowest level consisted of badges with a small scope; the second tier of badges represented mastery of larger technologies and corresponded to major projects in the course; and the third badge level represented course-level mastery of all technologies and concepts taught in the course.

We created additional levels of badges beyond our course to provide a way for teachers to learn how to successfully integrate into actual teaching experiences the technologies they have previously learned in our class.

Design of the Open Online Course
To help our former students continue earning badges (as there are more badges available than are needed to complete the course), or any inservice teacher, we created an open online version of the course. By using asynchronous video discussions, currently enrolled students and inservice teachers can interact with each other and discuss class topics, real-world challenges inservice teachers are experiencing, and ways to use technology in their specific subject. We believe this approach will help our current students have a more authentic experience in learning and preparing to use these technologies and bring to their attention challenges facing current teachers. We believe inservice teachers will benefit by not only learning technologies and earning badges, but by discussing with our current students to gain insights from a younger demographic.

Current findings
We have just recently collected data from the first semester implementation, and in our presentation will share this data on how our implementation of the badges impacted student achievement and motivation."

URL http://iptedtec.org

Sheryl Grant's "5 Buckets for Badge System Design"

Their Course - Integrating Technology in Education
The couirse is a 1 credit course, 3 major projects in which student selected a technology they wanted to integrate into an assignment.
The badge system had a course level badge, project level badge, and lower level badges.
The system had to be flexible to account for choices of technology that the students might choose.
The goal of the class is about how to appropriately plan for tech integration, not just learning tech.

Course is in Canvas but they wanted it to be more open so they used Wordpress: http:iptedtec.org/secondaryed/

 All of their tutorials are online and openly licensed. It is open as they could make it and still maintain the integrity of the endorsement.

Clicking on any badge brings up the criteria behind the badge.

Badge issuer available on GitHub msedev/badges

A look at the open online course - using Canvas and running the course as a MOOC. The open online course would let students to get their endorsement and "brand." It is a truly open course - all content is openly licensed. Non-university students enrolled to earn badges but not university credit. Limited numbers. They are using the "free for teacher" account.  They liked the quiz system and the feedback that could be provided. It also supports asynchronous video discussion boards.

In-service teachers were encouraged to enroll because the course was free. Only a few inservice teachers made it past the first week.

They have only been doing this for a year.

For the future, they need to scale the assessments. How do you bring in more students while maintaining the quality and academic integrity. They want to create a "smart dashboard."  They want to research student motivation, teacher professional development, and employer perceptions.

Related articles

• Do-It-Yourself Badges (hastac.org)
• Answering your questions about Open Badges (dougbelshaw.com)
• 5 Buckets for Badge System Design: "You Are Here" (hastac.org)
• Badge-Based Professional Development: Purposes and Possibilities (hastac.org)

Open Textbooks and the Student Debt Crisis

Loans (Photo credit: zingbot)

Daniel De Vise at The Washington Post reported that student loan debt is now at "$870 billion nationally, surpassing the nation’s outstanding balance on auto loans ($730 billion) and credit cards ($693 billion)." This is according to the report "Grading Student Loans," a source  that De Vise refers to as "a scholarly blog post published by the economists at the New York Fed." The cost of education has far outstripped the rise in the cost of living and the rising cost of healthcare. And yet, despite the fact that there are free solutions to the textbook part of the equation, educators are slow to adopt them. Open textbooks are free, openly licensed textbooks that are electronically available to students at no cost, and available to students in hard-copy for the cost of printing. They are also editable by the instructors.

There are major implementations of open education resources and textbooks, organizations dedicated to their creation, grants and initiatives for hosting and support, but there are still many educators out there who do not know about open textbooks. Many of the common questions about open education resources and open textbooks have been answered, but apparently not widely publicized. Some of the perceptions of OERs - that they are hard to find, of low quality, not peer-reviewed, etc. are out-dated views. Lets take a quick look at some of these questions

Where do I find them?
There are many sources of open textbooks. I really like the high quality collection of open textbooks that are being hosted by the Saylor Foundation.  One can also go to College Open Textbooks which is a good portal to other sites. There are many other sites that are hubs to open textbook sites.

What kind of quality?
Before we discuss quality, I would urge you to read my posting on "The Myth of Commercial Textbook Reliability." I don't think that open textbooks should be held the same scrutiny as commercial textbooks - it needs to be more. We can do better as an academic community than the commercial businesses are doing now. We do not have to wait through a two year publication cycle to make corrections or amendments to open textbooks. We don't have to produce or have the students buy "supplemental materials" because we can customize open textbooks for the needs of our particular students in our community.There are some very high quality open textbooks out there including the ones mentioned above from the Saylor Foundation.

But are they peer-reviewed?
There is a peer review process for open textbooks and it is evolving all the time. OpenStax is one provider of free, open source, peer reviewed text books, and there are organizations like College Open Textbooks are sponsoring peer review processes as well. And why can't we develop a process for this on our campuses?

The rising cost of education is fueling innovation in education such as open eduction resources, open textbooks, and to some extent, MOOCs (massive online open courses). As educators, we have a moral obligation to remove barriers to education and to open up the opportunities that education can provide to everyone. Now is not the time to balk at change; change is coming whether we want it to or not. Innovation does not have to be in the hands of the corporations. MOOCs were not invented by corporations but by innovative educators. We can decide if we want that change to come from forward thinking educators who can shape innovation, or we can wait for crushing debts to make the changes for us.

Note: I have more links to OER and open textbook resources on my OER page. 

Related articles

• Housing's Big Challenge: Student Debt (cnbc.com)
• New report: Total student loan debt has nearly tripled since 2004 (jsonline.com)
• Student debt tripled in eight years (salon.com)
• Student Loan Burden Could Be a Blow to Economic Recovery (dailyfinance.com)
• A Free Textbook Alternative (uiowa.uloop.com)

OER: Saylor Foundation's New Bookshelf

Saylor Foundation

The Saylor Foundation is making spirits bright and starting the New Year right by ensuring that openly licensed, free textbooks remain freely available to students. You may have seen their press release. Their "Bookshelf" page is already up and the books that are due to go behind Flat World Knowledge paywall are now freely available. They are saving us the trouble of downloading them and hosting them ourselves.

"Each of the books listed below is freely available for download, online reading, and sharing, under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. Please share this link (and the blog post) with your networks to help spread the word!

Like many of you, we have come to rely on the free-to-read versions of the excellent texts at Flat World Knowledge. We’ve woven these books tightly into many of our free online courses, all of which rely on freely-accessible (and preferably openly-licensed) materials. When Flat World Knowledge announced recently that its previously openly-licensed books would not be available for free after January 1st, 2013, we decided to preserve the whole catalog, which we now happily share with you.

We are grateful to Flat World Knowledge for developing such an excellent catalog, and while the versions on the Flat World Knowledge website will no longer be free, the publisher continues to provide its texts at prices significantly lower than standard textbooks and with much added-value in the form of supplementary materials and interactive elements."

The Saylor Foundation certainly warrants all of our support for the coming year. I want to encourage everyone who reads this blog to seriously consider supporting this foundation. As educators, we obviously cannot rely on for-profits to keep the best interests of the students in mind.

Related articles

• Saylor.org now hosts free and open versions of Flat World Knowledge texts (saylor.org)
• Free and Open Versions of Flat World Knowledge Texts (classroom-aid.com)
• Flat World Knowledge Falls Flat (cain.blogspot.com)
• Release: Three Saylor.org Courses Yield College Credit Recommendation (saylor.org)

Open Textbooks: Community and Sustainability

Redwood Majesty (Photo: MizzD)

In our discussions with faculty and administrators about free, openly licensed textbooks, I still get questions about "sustainability." Those questions really boil down to "who is going to pay for all of that work?" Often the implication is that we some how need to mimic the commercial textbook publishing model in order to get "a quality product." This is in spite of the fact that commercial textbooks only really have the illusion of being quality products (see "The Myth of Commercial Textbook Reliability"). And there are companies out there that will be happy to sell you something not-quite-entirely-unlike-open textbooks to help preserve administrators' and teachers' comfort levels with the past models. It is nice to think that there is this all-knowing mental giant of a subject matter expert who went to all of the right schools who will once and for all explain it all into a single book (okay, maybe with some relatively inexpensive supplements, study guides, and test banks). We have to break out of thinking that a textbook is a course. Teaching and learning does not come out of books but from interaction with one another; with engagement. This interaction is best facilitated in community. Here in the community college, it begins in the local school districts with our dedicated faculty reaching out to the local high schools and learning about the challenges the students face. The engagement comes when experienced faculty begin to assess their students and shape their teaching and teaching materials to the needs of their students. And yes, finding quality textbooks as a community can be part of that. But what if part of the equation, part of the problem is that the students can't afford those textbooks? Or the school districts can no longer afford to pay for those textbooks? Or if the textbooks don't really address the needs of the students? Do we make the students buy more supplements to the textbooks?

Over and over again, I am finding that the answer to these questions is community. The math department at College of the Redwoods is just one of many examples I could point to. The teachers have written their own openly licensed textbooks based on their experience with the local students. They created the textbooks first because they found the current commercial textbooks inadequate for addressing the issues of the local students but then also to save the students money, to lower the cost of education.The math department used money from their budget, faculty meetings, sabbaticals, etc. to work on their textbooks. The books are hosted on the math department server along with the online assessment system that they created to accompany their books.

College of the Redwoods also participated in the Kaleidoscope Project. The Kaleidoscope Project focused on community: the eight partner colleges, and the collaboration of the instructors from these colleges to adopt open course designs for general education courses. Common assessments were encouraged, and materials were iteratively improved based on student results. The project also focused on the adoption and development of existing open textbooks rather than creating new materials. The key to the success of Kaleidoscope was the community, not the money.

True sustainability in open textbooks will not look like the previous models of commercial textbook publishing. We already know that we cannot afford that. It will look more like an on-going seminar with high quality, community based OERs and open textbooks as the result. The Creative Commons licensing model will be important. I believe we will need to put an "NC" - a non-commercial license on open textbooks to prevent commercial businesses from locking openly licensed content behind pay walls.

So how do we make OERs and open textbooks sustainable? Change our thinking on textbooks and their relation to courses. Change our thinking on tenure and publishing. For a start, we can do (and formalize) what many communities are already doing:

• Give faculty release time for writing and editing textbooks
• Tie writing OERs and textbooks to tenure
• Participate in the peer-review of OERs and open textbooks (e.g. MEROT Open Textbook Initiative and the College Open Textbooks Community, etc.)
• Leverage the community that already exists (academic senates, student govt., school boards, etc.) to address these problems
• Get serious about removing financial barriers to education for students

There are many models of sustainability out there besides the Kaleidoscope Project (such as Open Access Textbooks).

Math Textbooks at College of the Redwoods:

This is from the math department web page at College of the Redwoods. The bookstore once told me that they thought that about 70 percent of the students bought a copy of the book even though a free version was available.

• Math 376:
• Each Math 376 student will be provided a free textbook and solutions manual on CD.
  The textbook and solutions manual are also available online at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/PreAlgText
  
• Many students find that they also want a printed version of the textbook and/or solutions manual.
  
  • You will be able to purchase a new printed version of the textbook from lulu.com for $20 plus shipping, and the solutions manual for $20 plus shipping.
    
• For more information on Math 376 textbooks and other resources, see the department course page at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/mathdept/courses/math376.php
• Math 380 options:
• Each Math 380 student will be provided a free textbook and solutions manual on CD.
  The textbook and solutions manual are also available online at http://mathrev.redwoods.edu/ElemAlgText
  
• Many students find that they also want a printed version of the textbook and/or solutions manual.
  
  • You will be able to purchase a new printed version of the textbook from lulu.com for $20 plus shipping, and the solutions manual for $18 plus shipping.
    
• For more information on Math 380 textbooks and other resources, see the department course page at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/mathdept/courses/math380.php
• Math 120: 
• Each Math 120 student will be provided a free textbook and solutions manual on CD.
  The textbook and solutions manual will also be available online at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/IntAlgText
  
• Many students find that they also want a printed version of the textbook and/or solutions manual. You will be able to purchase printed versions from the CR bookstore.
• For more information on Math 120 textbooks and other resources, see the course page at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/mathdept/courses/math120.php

Related articles

• Open Academics at the University of Minnesota (cain.blogspot.com)
• Flat World's shift in gears and what it means for open textbook publishing (insidehighered.com)
• Help a dude write an open-source calculus textbook (or use one of the many great ones already available) (aperiodical.com)
• Hacking the Open Textbook (insidehighered.com)

Creative Commons Turns 10!

Cable Green (Photo: DTKindler Photo)

 This note just in from the ubiquitous Cable Green:

As I'm sure you know, this year is Creative Commons' 10th Birthday! Starting this Friday, we'll be launching into a 10-day frenzy of celebrations leading up to 16 December - the day the first CC license suite was launched in 2002.

The celebrations will be wide ranging, including more than 20 celebrations worldwide, a dedicated website (http://10.creativecommons.org), interviews and featured resources, a social media campaign and our usual annual fundraising campaign.

As part of the CC community, there are many things you can do to help:

• Add a widget or banner to your website: you can find the official CC10 logo here: (scroll to the bottom of the page): http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC10 
• Go to a party, or encourage your friends to attend. There are CC10 events planned on every continent (except Antarctica), starting tonight and continuing almost every day through December 16. There are even some online events and webinars. See them all listed at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC10 
• Friend us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/creativecommons), follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/creativecommons), and let your friends know. The hashtag for the celebrations will be #CC10
• Give CC a birthday present! Write something, draw something, compose something - whatever you do well - and add it to our CC10 Flickr group: http://bit.ly/cc10flickr, or send it to us via Twitter, Facebook or at press@creativecommons.org
• And, of course, please encourage your friends and family to donate (or even donate yourself) at https://creativecommons.net/donate/ 

Most gratefully,
Cable

Cable Green,
PhD Director of Global Learning
Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/education
http://twitter.com/cgreen

Creative Commons is turning 10! 

Please give a birthday gift: 

https://creativecommons.net/donate

Related articles

• Copyright and Creative Commons (slideshare.net)
• Creative Commons (cathyfarrow.wordpress.com)
• The Future of Creative Commons: Examining defenses of the NC and ND clauses (downes.ca)

Kaleidoscope Grant Research Findings

College of the Redwoods is a participant in the Kaleidoscope grant. This grant helped faculty partner with other colleges to develop free, openly licensed textbooks to help students save a significant amount of money. The Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources is sponsoring a webinar with a few of the participants to discuss the results of the grant. Their invitation is below:

(Photo credit: Dmitry Baranovskiy)

Please join us Tuesday, December 4, 10:00 am PST for a webinar on OER Research findings on student outcomes and faculty and student feedback. The Kaleidoscope project, a collaboration between six community colleges and two 4-year colleges, developed OER for eight General Education courses and will report on student learning outcomes and faculty satisfaction. Florida Virtual Campus has been administering surveys to both faculty and students using open textbooks and open educational resources at their college and university campuses through their Open Access Textbook project and will share their findings from the last three years. Another Next Generation Learning Grant funded project Bridge-2-Success has worked with non-traditional students transitioning back to college or entering for the first time to improve college success. Working with Open University UK adapted open educational resources (OER) and online data gathering, they will share student outcome data from Anne Arundel and their 20 pilot colleges.

Dr. Robin Donaldson, Director of Open Access Textbooks and Project Manager of Orange Grove, Florida Virtual Campus Robin will give us an overview of the student and faculty survey feedback from 2010 and 2011 and will compare how data has changed over time.

Dr. Nassim Ebrahimi, Ann Arundel Community College Nassim will report on student learning outcomes finding from the Bridge-2-Success project at Ann Arundel and the 20 pilot community colleges that participated.

Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning. Kim will share differences in how students performed in classrooms using OER compared to those who continued to use publisher materials. She will also report on satisfaction among faculty participants.

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No pre-registration necessary. 

On the day of the webinar, please click here to login and then press the Connect button.

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WritingCommons.Org and Community-Based OER Models

Kicking the OERs old school.

I read a great posting at Writing Commons this morning entitled "Flat World Knowledge, Textbook Affordability, and a Call for More Collaborative Efforts" that really echoes my thinking on this. Since Flat World Knowledge is no longer open (as defined by Hewlett and many other definitions of OER), it makes the community efforts around open textbooks all the more important. I have long been a proponent of community developed, vetted, and maintained OERs and open textbooks. Please note that I did not say "I am against business." I am for efforts that are truly open to make open textbooks and other OERs freely available to students. This is not some radical notion - it is a return to the original intent of textbooks which is to support student learning rather than to support "sustainable business models." If someone figures out how to do both, more power to them. In the meantime, we need to support Writing Commons, an online composition textbook.

"We at Writing Commons have been working to provide quality open-access articles about writing and research and will continue to do so. While our materials are not yet comprehensive, we are adding new peer-reviewed material every month. We encourage instructors to email us about any gaps in our coverage (suggestions may be sent to jennifer@writingcommons.org), and we can work suggestions into future calls for papers. And while we have not yet made our open textbook customizable, as had Flat World Knowledge, our site does enable instructors looking to incorporate WC articles into their lesson plans to select and assign material as needed. (See http://writingcommons.org///site-map-1 for a table of contents.) Currently, WC editors are developing an instructional video that will guide users through the site; we hope that this video will help teachers efficiently select the material most relevant to their courses."

These kinds of efforts need our support. I used to teach English and I have a lot of teaching materials and workbooks that I have written that I am planning on contributing time and materials to this community. Please pass this on to others you many know who can contribute materials or time for reviewing materials. OERs from an open community of instructors, administrators, instructional designers is going to be the truly sustainable model.  

Related articles

• Flat World Knowledge Falls Flat (cain.blogspot.com)
• Premium Free Range OER (cain.blogspot.com)
• Open Academics at the University of Minnesota (cain.blogspot.com)
• OER Adopter Communities: the Sustainability Factor in Open Education (cain.blogspot.com)

16 Resources for Free Images for Educators

Abraham Lincoln with Allan Pinkerton and Major General John Alexander McClernand at the Battle of Antietam. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The search for quality images continues...

We have faculty who are creating course materials and in some cases, replacing Fair Use images with public domain, fair use, or Creative Commons licensed images. There are still some holes in our image searches. The links here are my most recent suggestions but I know that some of these are older than others and besides Wikipedia and advanced Google Searches (which are good), there are other sources. This is really just a representative list to get us started.

These are in alphabetical order - not in order of quality or breadth.

1. Archive.Org. - This is the grand daddy of all public domain archives for images, text, audio, and film. It takes a bit to get used to using the site but once you get the hang of it, it is well worth it. Lots of treasures here.
2. American Memory - These are history images from the Library of Congress.
3. Bowdoin Botany Database - These images copyrighted but are free for educators: "Educators and students may use these images as part of their teaching, research, and/or studies, but may not sell or otherwise make a profit on their use."
4. Burning Well - This is one of numerous archives of public domain images.
5. Cadyu provides public domain and Creative Commons licensed 3-d images of objects. This would be appropriate for a design class, autocad, etc.
6. Clipart Etc. - From the University of Florida. A maximum of fifty (50) clipart items may be used in any non-commercial, educational project (report, presentation, display, website, etc.) without special permission.
7. Creative Commons Search - This combines multiple search engines and gives you the results in one spot based on license chosen.
8. Environmental Education Station.- These are public domain photos that were funded by an environmental studies grant. These photos are royalty free and may be used without charge for any educational purpose with attribution to David Anderson.
9. Images in the Public Domain - Many of these are from old encyclopedias. Still useful.
10. Library of Congress - Most of the images in these holdings are in public domain unless specifically cataloged otherwise.
11. Public Domain Images - This site collects high quality public domain images.
12. Public Domain Image links- This is from the University of Wisconsin. Great metasite with links to many public domain resources.
13. Smithsonian - They encourage educational fair use of all of their images as long as you cite the source. Many of their images are in public domain unless they specify copyright information.
14. Web Gallery of Art- is intended to be a free resource of art history primarily for students and teachers. It is a private initiative not related to any museums or art institutions, and not supported financially by any state or corporate sponsors.
15. Wikimedia sometimes works...I found that the best way to search wikimedia is to go to Google and type: site:commons.wikimedia.org "search term" where “search term” equals a single word like “photosynthesis.” Notice that there is only a single space AFTER “org.” Do not put a space after the colon.
16. U.S. Government Public Domain- The US govt. has made it easier to find images that they have produced that are in the public domain. They are freely available and need no permission.

What are we missing? Is there a source that you use? Which of these are best in your experience? We would really appreciate your comments, experiences or suggestions below!

These are just in from Bosha Struve:

Digital Media

• Behold
• ClearBits - Open licensed digital media (it has distribution plans and pricing but you can get a free account).
• Compfight
• Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Reading Room (different from the one you have posted)

Other Resource Guides

• OER Handbook for Educators
• Open DOAR
• WikiEducator: Exemplary Collection of Open eLearning Content Repositories

Related articles

• 7 Great Ways To Find Free Images Online (makeuseof.com)
• Help:Public domain image resources (meta.wikimedia.org)
• Great images to download for free (stretchmoney.wordpress.com)
• Free Stock Photos For Your Blog (laniseb.wordpress.com)

Implementing OERs and Open Textbooks

The Engineering Building at the University of Leicester. Designed by James Stirling.(Wikipedia)

There is still a lot of energy out there around the creation of open content and the licensing of existing content with open licences. There are many worthwhile projects out there that are interested in creating OERs such as SCORE in the UK. But how do we use these materials effectively? How can we roll out this content in the most effective manner? Who is evaluating these materials for quality? These are common questions about OERs and they point to an evolutionary history of OERs: creation, repositories, evaluation, assessment, and implementation. There are three projects worth taking a close look at even if you are already aware of them because there are common themes arising in OER implementation. 

 The OSTRICH Project - "The OSTRICH project, funded by the Higher Education Academy and JISC, and led by the University of Leicester, will transfer and cascade the key outcomes of Leicester’s institutional open educational resources (OER) pilot project, OTTER, to the universities of Bath and Derby." Why do you need to know about this? Because their blog provides an excellent model for implementing and assessing OERs. You can follow the evolution of their implementation step-by-step through their blog.

Kaleidoscope Project - "Project Kaleidoscope is implementing a set of fully open general education courses across eight colleges serving predominantly at-risk students. The project will dramatically reduce textbook costs and allow collaborative improvement of course design to improve student success." This project built assessment and peer review into the implementation process. The genius of the project is that it brings multiple colleges together not only to review OERs and open textbooks but to find common course outcomes and develop common assessments. This is a critical stage in the history of the implementation of OERs. This project shows that inter-institutional collaboration is a key factor in OER implementation success.

SAIDE ACEMaths Project - "The aim of the SAIDE ACEMaths project was to pilot a collaborative process for the selection, adaptation and use of OER materials for teacher education programmes in South Africa. Our latest research article entitled Collaborative Design and Use of Open Educational Resources: A Case Study of a Mathematics Teacher Education Project in South Africa by Ingrid Sapire and Yvonne Reed was published in Distance Education vol. 32 no. 2 August 2011." 

OPAL: Open Education Quality Initiative - "Open educational resources, and open education more generally, are considered to have huge potential to increase participation and educational opportunities at large and to promote widening participation and lifelong learning. At the same time, the past decade has shown that openness in itself is not enough to unfold this potential. It is important to shift the focus more to the actual open practice of using, reusing, or creating open educational opportunities: open educational practice." They have published numerous case studies on the implementation of OERs. 


Each one of these projects emphasizes collaboration in one way or another. Instructors are learning how to work together to reuse, remix, and share OERs through these projects, but beyond that, they are identifying the practices that will make the implementation of OERs successful. 

Related articles

• OER Use, Reuse and Remixing (hackeducation.com)
• The No Textbook Degree (opencontent.org)
• OERs and Biology at Collge of the Redwoods (cain.blogspot.com)

Parallels in Open Software and Open Textbooks

Dr. Cable Green speaking to Creative Commons staff (Photo credit: tvol)

I was reading this morning about what makes a successful open source project and what makes one not so successful, and I found a number of parallels between successful open source software projects and the creation and implementation of open textbooks. For instance, Andy Brice writing on a failed software project lists "lack of support from the people who would actually have to use it" as one of the reasons for the project failing. Symbian is another example - this was meant to be an open source platform but after the announcement that it was going open source, a year went by before anyone had access to the source code. OpenMediaVault was meant to be open source. The software was freely available to users but developers had to pay a licensing fee. Back in 2005, Xara announced that its graphic package was going open source and "two years later, the project is stagnant and on the verge of irrelevance, primarily because the company couldn't figure out how to work with the open source community" (Nathan Willis). Online community is the backbone of any open source project; I even read about a company that wanted to take it's start up money and create an online community around their product. This is definitely a cart before the horse. What does all this have to do with open textbooks? If you have been around the open textbook community for any length of time, you will begin to see these same factors emerge in online textbook success stories. Story after story tells us the importance of community in an open source project. A successful open textbook is like an open source project in that it is:

• Freely available 
• Get money out of the way of creation & development and into support
• Keep the licenses open
• Accessible
• Make the text and files available to all in a useable, editable form
• Multiple formats will help others adapt the work for students with different needs
• Built by the community
• Find others who are interested in contributing to similar works. This was the important lesson from the Kaleidoscope project.
• An open textbook created by local teachers will be more powerful and relevant than one made by a corporation with no idea of local student needs
• Maintained by a community
• A community can edit, share, and adapt instantly
• A community can solve problems, translate docs into other languages, create new versions
• Implemented by a community
• The top down approach is doomed to failure (see your local school)

Just as the open source software community needed a license to keep open source software open, the Creative Commons organization is answering questions about licensing strategies that educators are asking as they author course materials and textbooks. The next stage in OERs (and this has started already) is building open communities around these projects. (e.g. College Open Textbooks, MERLOT and Connexions).
Here is a presentation I gave this morning making the connections between open software and open textbooks:

Related articles

• Making It Easier For Faculty To Find Quality Open Textbooks (keptup.typepad.com)
• Free Textbooks Shaking Up Higher Education (business.time.com)
• Beating the High Cost of Education with Open Textbooks (cain.blogspot.com)
• Legislator Proposes Open Access Textbook System For California (keptup.typepad.com)