Tag Archives: OER

Pearson Introduce OpenClass

Posted on by

Some interesting developments in online education platforms. Pearson Publishing who provides the MathXL platform I use for teaching online is introducing OpenClass. It is a new kind of learning management system that is offered through the ‘Cloud‘ via Google Apps for Education.

OpenClass will be offered free of charge. A beta version is supposed to be available October 18th. Pearson’s model is to provide and charge for curriculum content. However, other content providers will also be able to make use of the platform.

For more details see the press release here. See their website at http://www.joinopenclass.com. A promotional video, without much in the way of details, is available here.

This development could very well be the ‘game changer’ Pearson claims it to be. The demand for online learning continues to grow, here in BC and around the world.

I Have Seen the Future — and it includes Open educational resources (OER)

Posted on by

I have been asked to give a brief, five minute, presentation on Open Educational Resources (OER) at our school’s welcome back event. Let’s start out with what are OERs?

Open educational resources (OER) are digital materials that can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more, made available for free through open licenses, which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone.[1]

A key part of OERs is that they are available under a Creative Commons License which permits the re-use and even re-mixing of educational resources.

There are a number of repositories available providing a range of resources from learning objects through to complete courses. Here are some examples:

To see more about what I’ve written about Open Eduational Resoures, enter OER into the search box on the top right of the screen.

New Mathematics Resources for Developmental Educators

Posted on by

On June 30th, I participated in webinar presentation on the National Repository of Online Courses’ new developmental math online materials. I blogged about this earlier. See http://faculty.camosun.ca/martinbuck/2011/03/01/nroc-focus-group/ for background info.

The project’s website is http://www.nrocmath.org. A recording of the webinar is available at this link. You may also download the slides.

These media rich materials may have some application to our fundamental level learners at Songhees. I will be following up in the coming days about piloting the materials at Songhees.

Essential Skills for Fundamental and Intermediate Math Learners

Posted on by

As part of my 2011 Schedule (Faculty) Development time, I’m looking at linking Camosun’s Fundamental Math (021 through 039) and Intermediate Math (052 through 057) learning outcomes to the Human Resources and Skills Development Canada’s (HRSDC) numeracy essential skills. The former are provincially articulated here in British Columbia.

Some other resources that may prove to be helpful are available below.

Google Essential Skills Fundamental Math

Google Essential Skills Numeracy

What is clearly missing is a link between Open Educational Resources and Essential Skills. A google on those terms brings up mostly references to things I’ve written on the topic.

NROC Focus Group

Posted on by

I was invited to be part of a focus group of 12 college educators to view and discuss developmental OER math materials being developed by National Repository of Online Courses. They are an arm of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education.

The Gates Foundation is providing funding to them to develop developmental math materials specifically for disadvantaged students. NROC has received $5 million from Gates and $1 million from William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to develop online and hybrid materials. The goal is to increase number of financially disadvantaged students that pass developmental math. The target group are is those between 18 and 80 (average age 28) who who have failed math at least once. The project approach is to develop new educational interventions for national distribution and sustainability.

According to their website,

NROC content is distributed free-of-charge to students and teachers at public websites including HippoCampus. Institutions wishing to use NROC content are invited to join a fee-based membership organization, the NROC Network. Organizations serving disadvantaged students can become members of the NROC Network at no cost. http://www.montereyinstitute.org/nroc/nroc.html

Colleges wanting to use the materials in their LMS would need to join the NROC Network. However, we were told the materials will be freely available as standalone modules throught the hippocampus.org website.

The materials I saw demoed were in a Moodle environment, but their plan is support a number of platforms. The materials were presented in multimedia and text formats. The videos were in Flash format and plans are to include closed captioning. The latter has now been mandated for all educational videos available in the state of California and likely soon in the rest of the USA. They have also partnered with the KahnAcademy.org which has tens of thousands of video lessons available in YouTube format. The materials ranging from basic arithmetic through statistics will be released later this year and the next.

I came away favourably impressed. However, the missing piece is linkage to an assessment tool in a pre, post and unit test format that helps create ‘learnable’ moments for students. I like the way Pearson’s MathXL can make resources available to learners for each question and each concept. I don’t find the materials Pearson provides particularly helpful. The best of both worlds would be to link these kind of OER materials to an assessment tool like MathXL.