Welcome to the new BC gateway to Open Educational Resources.

Here you will find FREE TO USE learning resources that you can use to supplement your own course materials or learning. Some of these are from BC-based projects while others are from Open Educational Resource projects from around the world.

https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-books-and-your-rights

With eBooks exploding in general, not just in the would of Open Education, this post from the Electronic Freedom Frontier contains some really useful tips to ensure that the books you buy end up preserving rights you already have. Good advice too for those interested in the field of Open Textbooks; certain decisions we make may end up unintentionally removing certain basic freedoms or affordances of physical textbooks instead of enhancing these.

Tags: DRM.

OOER Project: Learning Resource Discovery Survey

The Organising Open Educational Resources (OOER) project has been funded under HEFCE/Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme. You can find out more about this project here:

http://www.medev.ac.uk/oer/

The purpose of this survey is to ask how you search for learning resources online, the sources you use, and how you evaluate the results you find. We are defining learning resources in the broadest sense, any online resource that can be used to support learning.

Please let them know your own strategies for finding and assessing learning resources online, the results will be shared and will help us all.

Tags: survey.

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/20559/.

In a wonderful demonstration of ‘walking the talk,’ Dr. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan remixed an existing open textbook, Think Python: How to Think like a Computer Scientist, in only 11 days to produce a new textbook for his class, ones students could print out for $10 using a local print-on-demand kiosk on campus.

Tags: computer science, python, remix, reuse.

http://code.google.com/edu/

Google has released code and curriculum in partnership with a number of US universities in the hopes of bringing contemporary coding practices into more university computer science curriculum. The materials are available for free under a Creative Commons license.

Tags: AJAX, computer science, Google, programming.

http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1008

If you are thinking about trying to get “openness” started at your institution, the students in David Wiley’s grad course, “IPT 692R: Open Education Policy Seminar” have done you a HUGE favour by compiling these Open Access and OER Policy Reviews. They have surveyed many of the leading institutions and identified salient aspects of their policies for others to learn from or emulate, a huge time saver when considering the policy complexities that can be involved with starting a formal project on campus.

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