By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Recipe for a Successful Institutional Open Education Initiative
Rajiv Jhangiani, WCET Frontiers, 2019/02/06
Nice article by Rajiv Jhangiani describing some of the essentially elements for a successful open education initiative. The article is based on his experience as the institutional lead for open educational practices at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) in British Columbia which launched Canada's first two Zed Cred programs (known as Z Degrees in the U.S.) - that is, programs based completely on open educational resources. He points to the need for existing grassroots support for such an initiative, the need for care and feeding of that support. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard Announces Patent Pledge in Support of Open Source Software
This is the big news today, of course. "The Blackboard Patent Pledge is a promise by the company to never assert its issued or pending course management system software patents against open source software or home-grown course management systems." That's good, though it's pretty clearly a response to the Free Software Foundation's success in getting the Blackboard patent reviewed. better to cut a deal before you don't have anything to protect, hm? And even then, it's not much of a promise. As the Sakai Foundation notes, in its response, "the Sakai Foundation and EDUCAUSE find it difficult to give the wholehearted endorsement we had hoped might be possible. Some of Sakai's commercial partners and valued members of the open source community will not be protected under this pledge." In particular, Blackboard wanted to reserve the right to take action against colleges and universities, something it needs to do, apparently, because of its current case against the Canadian company Desire2Learn. Bottom line? It's a cynical ploy intended to divide its opponents. The appeal should be carried through. The patent should be invalidated. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenID for Non-SuperUsers
I've been skipping more links on OpenID than I've been passing along - there has been a proliferation of them recently. But this item is a good moderately techie description of OpenID, with example, and enough links to let you dive in, look at actual PHP code (ugh! spaghetti) and find out about HTTP digest authentication. Whew. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Repositories and OpenID
Some buzz is beginning to build around OpenID, which is good, as it (or something like it) is the best (and only) hope against the morass of logins we've found ourselves in. here's the question: "Why don't we just use OpenIDs as author identifiers in institutional repositories?" Some indications of what the institutional response (which must own everything) will be: "I'm not sure that Traugott was very impressed... possibly for good reason! He was particularly concerned about legacy issues for example." Yeah, well, were I a student I would be worried about an institutional ID that isn't portable and that disappears when I graduate. See also Wesley Fryer on OpenID. Dave Tosh also mentions it in passing. Also worth a look is this short (4 page) summary of the Identity management Summit. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Content Alliance
Interesting. "The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!" It seems sort of like the commercial answer to the Open CourseWare Consortium. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open-Of-Course
Another startup: "Open-Of-Course is a multilingual portal for free online courses and tutorials. By 'free' we not only mean free as in 'free beer' but also published as open content." The right idea - but when will these form a network, rather than merely focusing on individual sites? But hey, I'm cheering for the open educational content. More...