It critically examines specialist open and distance learning (ODL) universities. Institutions such as The Open University (UKOU), Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and the University of South Africa (UNISA), have pioneered instructional and support methods, opening pathways for many non-traditional students. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms
Sanjay Sarma, Karen E. Willcox, Philip H. Lippel, MIT Open Education Policy Initiative, 2016/04/04
This is an interesting forward-looking document from MIT. While the authors take pains to be clear that this is not a blueprint for the future of education, it does draw out some interesting lines of thoughts, including recommendations for research collaboration, showing the relevance of online learning to higher ed, creating the 'learning engineer', and fostering change to implement reforms. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms
Sanjay Sarma, Karen E. Willcox, Philip H. Lippel, MIT Open Education Policy Initiative, 2016/04/04
This is an interesting forward-looking document from MIT. While the authors take pains to be clear that this is not a blueprint for the future of education, it does draw out some interesting lines of thoughts, including recommendations for research collaboration, showing the relevance of online learning to higher ed, creating the 'learning engineer', and fostering change to implement reforms. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OER as a participatory activity
Sean Connor, Saylor, 2016/04/15
Saylor writes and endorses the recent Creative Commons post on OER as a participatory activity. But it adds, "Saylor Academy would absolutely benefit from infrastructure that would encourage us, our students, our partners, and members of the wider open community to really create the open content we need from the open content that we have." Of course, I've spent my entire career working toward this. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Active OER: Beyond open licensing policies
Timothy Vollmer, Creative Commons, 2016/04/14
Here is the point of the post in a nutshell: "If we agree that empowerment and engagement of educators and learners is an important goal, we need to implement active policies that build on and support the potential ensured by passive ones," policies such as incentives and infrastructure (but let's be honest: mostly incentives). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. First steps in integrating LATs OER into Moodle open book
David T. Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, 2016/04/04
This post is a little bit 'inside baseball' but it explores the sort of question that's becoming more significant to us as we accelerate development of our personal learning environment, so it's interesting to me. Something typical: "Ahh, broken link.  The IMS version links back to Blackboard.  The equivalent web version has the open link." Bleah. More...