SpeakApps Open Educational Resources (OER) consists of a set of online tools for practising oral production and interaction when learning foreign languages.
The SpeakApps openly licensed tools are directed at different types of activities and are suitable for all students, regardless of the level they have reached in a particular language.
The platform's OER repository allows teachers to find a growing amount of activities and experiences to be carried out in their classrooms. Moreover, and since the repository is build in a wiki environment, users are able to actively contribute to the project by modifying and adapting activities to their needs.

“Building open bridges: collaborative remixing and reuse of open educational resources across organisations” is a paper published in March 2013 by the University of Nottingham (UK) exploring new creative collaboration practices related to OER.
Authors Tim Coughlan, Rebecca Pitt and Patrick McAndrew explore in this paper practices that, developed as a set of course materials, were released as OER from the UK, remixed for a US context by a cross-organisational, cross- cultural team, and then reused in a broad range of educational settings. The approaches taken during these remixing and reuse activities as novel forms of creative collaboration are also analysed.
Researchers identify how openness has provoked novel inter- organisational collaboration and forms of ownership. They also define forms of open practice that need support and present issues that should be considered in devising and supporting open projects in education and beyond.

“Perspectives on Open and Distance Learning: Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice” is one in a series of publications by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) examining Open Educational Resources (OER). The book, initiated by the UNESCO/COL Chair in OER, describes the movement in detail, providing readers with insight into OER’s significant benefits, its theory and practice, and its achievements and challenges. The 16 chapters of the volume, published in May 2013, have been written by some of the leading international experts on the subject and are organised into four parts by theme:

6-8pm Mon. 15 July. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) began in September 2011 at Stanford and it is already clear that they have radically changed higher education. Free programs from brand name universities with world leading experts, with online assessment and Ivy League certificates of completion at the end of a rigorous program, are a real competitor for face-to-face universities in the international education market, especially now that MOOC programs are recognized by many universities. And some institutions are incorporating MOOC units in their own programs, radically reducing teaching costs. Will academic staff numbers in Australia fall? What are the implications for the teaching/research nexus and for national research capacity? But should the world take its curriculum content from the American Ivy League and a handful of others. And is online assessment adequate and does the excision of face-to-face teaching and discussion take vital elements out of degrees? What do students want?
Confirmed speakers:
A/Prof. Gregor Kennedy, Director of eLearning, University of Melbourne
Prof. Beverley Oliver, Pro Vice-Chancellor Learning Futures, Deakin University
Chair: Prof. Simon Marginson, Chair of Higher Education, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne
VENUE: Woodward Conference Centre, 10th Floor, Melbourne Law School, Pelham St, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria.
Jointly presented by the Centre for the Study of Higher Education & the LH Martin Institute.

The power of funding alone should not be enough to override academic freedom, argues Curt Rice, nor does open access automatically skew the world of scholarship. Are politicians stealing our academic freedom? Is their fetish with open access publishing leading to a 'pay to say' system for the rich? And will the trendy goal of making publicly financed research freely available skew the world of scholarship even further towards the natural sciences? I don't think so. But it took me a while to get there.
The freedom to choose
Academic freedom lets scientists choose the research questions they want to ask. They can pursue their hypotheses however they like. Their results and reasoning can be discussed without any fear of reprisals from governments or universities. The frontiers of knowledge move forward without political interference or personal risk because of academic freedom.
The Norwegian government recently wrote about open access publishing as a potential threat to academic freedom: "All research that is publicly financed should be openly accessible. This principle, however, must not hinder the academic freedom researchers enjoy to choose their preferred channels of publication." Read more...

The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) invites expressions of interest for producing courseware in the form of an open educational resource for training teacher trainers in high quality open, distance and online learning. The target group for this call is an institution or consortium of actors/ institutions and the initial focus of the project is Africa.
Open, distance and online learning is rapidly expanding in universities and colleges in Africa and Asia, but faculty training has not caught up with the speed of development. According to the African Union Commission, the number of new teachers required in Africa by the year 2015 is estimated to be 3.6 million.
Online training using OERs will facilitate mass training of teacher trainers, which again will facilitate trained teachers in filling the huge gap in demand for educators in Africa. By using OERs, courseware can be adapted to different cultures and languages.
The OER/ courseware to receive an ICDE grant should focus on the needs of teacher trainers to deliver high quality faculty training in open and distance/ online learning. The first regional area of priority should be Africa. A regional focus on Asia will be considered when the project has delivered. The expressions of interest must be submitted to the ICDE Secretariat, icde@icde.org by Friday 31 May 2013. ICDE will invite a smaller selection of applicants to deliver a bid in the form of a project proposal. One successful bidder will be invited to enter into a contract with ICDE.  The value of the grant is USD 8,500.

The UPV OpenCourseWare online platform offers teaching materials related to more than 100 subjects taught in the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain).
Open, free and accessible to everybody, this initiative is part of the international OCW Consortium and aims to show UPV's potential to attract the best students and to train professionals with a recognised standard of excellence.
Humanities, Law and Continuing Education subjects are included in the UPV OCW e-catalogue of free learning material.
The Universitat Politècnica de València UPV is a public educational and research institution with over 35,000 students and 2,600 faculty and research staff. URL: UPV OCW.

“Build it and they will come?– Inhibiting factors for reuse of open content in developing countries” is a paper written by Mathias Hatakka, from Örebro University (Sweden) and published in 2009 in the “The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries.“
Open content has the potential to change the playing field when it comes to every individual’s right to education. However, despite the benefits of OER, the usage is very low in developing countries. Understanding why content developers choose not to use it is the first step towards finding a solution to the problem.
Mr Hatakka focuses his qualitative study on the question “Which inhibiting factors for reuse do content developers in developing countries experience with open content?” To find an answer, interviews, questionnaires and observations have been made with content developers from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and from UNESCO’s Open Training Platform.
Findings show that many of the inhibiting factors with reuse of open content do not necessarily relate to the actual content. Educational rules and regulations, lack of infrastructure, teaching practices and traditions etc. are major obstacles that need to be overcome if the usage of open content should increase. URL: Paper.

By Jenny Mackness. With the rise of MOOCs there has been much speculation about the meaning of ‘open’, particularly with respect to the Higher Education business model.  It is clear that ‘open’ can be interpreted in a number of different ways.
In relation to MOOCs the term ‘open’ relates principally to open access, i.e. anyone can attend – there are no entry requirements. This could apply to face-to-face courses, as when University lecturers welcome members of the public to attend their lectures, and to online courses, where anyone with an internet connection and the appropriate technology can attend the course.
‘Open’ is also often associated with ‘free’, as in open resources on the web which can be freely downloaded and according to the creative commons license can be ‘customised’ to suit the user’s purposes. Read more...