By Roger Grosse. In recent years, there’s been an explosion of free educational resources that make high-level knowledge and skills accessible to an ever-wider group of people. In your own field, you probably have a good idea of where to look for the answer to any particular question. But outside your areas of expertise, sifting through textbooks, Wikipedia articles, research papers, and online lectures can be bewildering (unless you’re fortunate enough to have a knowledgeable colleague to consult). What are the key concepts in the field, how do they relate to each other, which ones should you learn, and where should you learn them?
Courses are a major vehicle for packaging educational materials for a broad audience. The trouble is that they’re typically meant to be consumed linearly, regardless of your specific background or goals. Also, unless thousands of other people have had the same background and learning goals, there may not even be a course that fits your needs. Recently, we (Roger Grosse and Colorado Reed) have been working on Metacademy, an open-source project to make the structure of a field more explicit and help students formulate personal learning plans. More...

Open Education Week is a series of events to increase awareness of the open education movement. The third annual Open Education Week takes place from 10-15 March, both online and offline around the world. Through the events and resources, the week will demonstrate what kind of opportunities open education has created and what we have to look forward to. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free and open to everyone, and there are multiple opportunities to contribute. More...

This issue features papers on the move from geographical to pedagogical student support at the Open University, UK; wellness promotion in online learning with examples from three American higher education institutions and a set of recommendations; OER in teaching and in learner support; student drop-out rates at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia; accessibility improvements for disabled students through cloud services at SUNY Empire State College, United States; course-embedded student support in ELT; and the introduction of an online student support platform at Wawasan Open University, Malaysia. More...

The dates for the 26th ICDE World Conference have been changed to 14-16 October 2015 to accommodate venue availability.
Meanwhile, registration is open for the ICDE International Conference to be held in Moscow in the Russian Federation in September 2014.
And you can get a flavour of the Balinese welcome delegates to the 2014 ICDE Standing Conference of Presidents (SCOP) meeting may expect in a short introductory video. More...

By Jason Rhode. UPCEA has made freely available the recording of Cable Green’s general session presentation titled, “Innovation, Access, and Open Education: The Business & Policy Case for OER” at the recent Summit for Online Leadership and Strategy. While the slides are available here, the recording is now available here. See more...

Taking aim at the high cost of commercial textbooks, Rice University-based publisher OpenStax College today announced a partnership with open-education pioneer Lumen Learning that is projected to save students $10 million over the next two years by facilitating the adoption of free, online textbooks by colleges and universities.
The new partnership will combine OpenStax College's free textbooks with Lumen Learning's support services to help higher education institutions and faculty members successfully transition to using readily available "open-educational resources" (OER). More...

Claudio Dondi, vice-president of the MENON Network (European innovation and research network member of EUCIS-LLL) intervened in a public hearing (see intervention summary) organised by the Committee on Culture and Education in the European Parliament on new technologies and open educational resources (read also the EP draft report). The hearing follows up on the release of the Commission’s Communication on “Opening Up Education” last September, foreseeing many actions to be undertaken in 2014 in the field of digital learning. Claudio Dondi welcomes the Communication’s holistic approach and recommended that the political ambition should be supported by adequate policy instruments. He took up on key elements of EUCIS-LLL position on the issue i.e. the crucial role of teachers, and underlined the importance of networks such as the Platform to mobilise Member States in a bottom up approach through grassroots stakeholders. See also EAEA position in reaction to the Communication.