Larry Cooperman, Associate Dean for Open Education at UCI, was re-appointed to the board of directors of the African Virtual University this July. He joins a board that consists of vice-chancellors and rectors elected by a General Assembly of 35 partner universities across the five regions of the African continent. The board continues under the […]
UCI Open to Present at Open Education Global in Krakow
UCI Open’s Larry Cooperman and Stefano Stefan will be presenting a talk entitled “Open Education Tool Development as Strategy” at this year’s Open Education Global conference in Krakow, Poland, on Tuesday, April 12, 2016. The presentation is part of the conference series “Open Education as Strategy,” and will describe how UCI Open is leveraging the […]
How do you choose your OERs?
I recently came across a research paper published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Chemistry Education Research and Practice entitled Integration of Open Educational Resources in Undergraduate Chemistry Teaching – a Mapping Tool and Lecturer’s Considerations (Feldman-Magor, Rom, and Tuvi-Arad; 2016) and since we are doing a lot of work with Open Chemistry here […]
OEWeb is Now Available on GitHub
OEWeb, UC Irvine’s open-source platform for hosting open educational materials on the web, is now available on GitHub. Click here to view and download the files: https://github.com/lmsasf/uci-open . Also, you can view a demonstration of OEWeb (from our March 10 webinar) here: https://youtu.be/drpKh_5NxPw.
Amazon Education Enters the OER World
Amazon recently announced Inspire, a platform for open educational resources (OERs) that is in beta testing and expected to be released to the public in a few months. (See the article on EdWeek’s Market Brief site for more information.) Inspire reportedly will allow users to upload, manage, and share content with a user interface having many of […]
Where do our visitors come from?
Google Analytics provides a ton of interesting data about our website (uci.open.edu) visitors. Some of it can be quite surprising! In this blog post, we’ll look at where our visitors come from, based on their IP addresses. Which country is in the number one spot? There is no surprise here; it’s the United States with 19,608 […]
The Role of Open Education Resources in Peer Learning
Peer learning refers to a pedagogical practice in which learners (students) come together formally or informally in order to share their knowledge of a given subject and help each other attain specific educational goals. The notion of peer learning is certainly not new but has been gaining visibility more rapidly with the advent of online […]
Unintended but Welcome Consequences of Using Open Resources
At this year’s Open Education Conference in Vancouver, Canada, there were several sessions on how the use of OER led to”better” learning outcomes for students than the use of “paid-for” textbooks and other materials. Needless to say, this is certainly a nice conclusion for supporters of the open education movement! However, is it really true […]
Free Textbooks, Anyone?
One of the most important uses of Open Education Resources (OERs) at many universities is as a textbook replacement. Several universities have begun offering what some institutions call “z-degrees,” meaning that they require “zero” textbooks. OERs take the place of textbooks. Examples include Tidewater Community College, Northern Virginia Community College, Thomas Edison State College, and the University System […]
Open Education – Who is it For?
One of the original motivating factors for the Open Education movement was to allow less-developed countries with fewer educational resources to have access to quality course materials from the world’s best universities. However, anyone can benefit from Open Education – even learners within a developed country like the United States! Case-in-point: The Williamson Community Unified […]