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Open business models
(Image Clarisse Meyer CC0 from Unsplash) At the Creative Commons summit I was lucky to get a copy of Paul Stacey and Sarah Hinchliff’s Made with Creative Commons. It explores businesses that have based a model through licensing some aspect of their product via a CC license. They set out a number of case studies such as Cards Against Humanity, Noun Project, OpenDesk, etc. It’s freely available (of course), and definitely worth a read. In the first part Paul and Sarah set out some key principles underlying the case studies. The authors are quite honest in stating that their approach to the book changed as they worked with the case…
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Developing models of open, online education
The “OOFAT” project is currently looking at different models of open, online, flexible and technology-enhanced learning (OOFAT) in higher education. It’s conducted on behalf of the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE), and a key element is the desire to cover and model a wide range of activity. Too often research projects are too focused on the search for new, innovative practices. The emphasis on very tech- oriented models also tends to favour the ‘silicon valley’ approach to education. This tends to over-represent some small scale examples, which often don’t develop into sustainable models once the hype has died down. These models are not always applicable to providers…
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Annotation & the net conundrum
Annotation tools such as hypothes.is have gathered a lot of interest over the past year, and certainly have a lot of potential in education. It was at Open Ed last year that Jon Becker brought some of the ethical issues to my attention. These tools allow others to overlay annotation and commentary on any site, visible to anyone with that browser extension. It’s not on that site as such, so they don’t need permission to do that. This is great for annotating, say, an article in a newspaper, or a Governmental press release for example. But as Audrey Watters points out, less great if as an individual, you have been…
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The mission statement
This follows on from yesterday’s post, last week at the Hewlett meeting I was asked to do a two minute presentation about OER work at the OU. There’s quite a lot to fit into two minutes, so I concentrated on four aspects: Research – the OER Hub conducts research on the impact of OER Community – GO-GN develops a global community of OER phD researchers Content – OpenLearn releases thousands of hours of openly licensed learning material International – projects like TESSA and TESS-India use locally developed OER to aid teacher education My overarching theme was that all of these could be directly influenced by the OU’s mission statement. Now,…
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The Open who?
I was at the Hewlett OER meeting, and then the Creative Commons summit last week in Toronto. I’ll blog about that later, but for now (and to mark the OU’s 48th birthday today), here is a short post about the Open University. I was surprised at how often during those two meetings I would say I was from the Open University, and it be the first time the person had heard of it. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, I don’t expect everyone to have heard of us, but in two meetings that are largely about open education, it was telling. The follow up conversation would then be along the…
