Serendipity35

OER Glue is a product (still under development) that comes from a Utah-based startup. It's a a browser-based tool that allow you to “glue” together OER resources online. Rather than having to copy-and-paste resources into a new setting, OER Glue will reuse and integrate resources.
When you find good OER (open education resources), you copy it to use, but OER keeps evolving and your project becomes outdated. OER Glue http://www.oerglue.com wants to allow you to mash live OERs into your project.

"Your content stays fresh," according to OER Glue's Web site. OER Glue also integrates with many important educational and cultural Web 2.0 platforms and sites, including Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blackboard, Moodle, Flickr, Wikipedia, Plone, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, MediaWiki, RSS, Delicious, Google Calendar, Survey Monkey, Maple TA, IRC, SMS, e-mail, and more.

See how OER GLUE works in brief

The site also offers open courses http://www.oerglue.com/courses. That's an area best represented by MIT's Open Courseware Initiative but there are many other sites. Check out the list at http://onlineanddistancelearning.com/oer.

In the last twenty years, open source technology has revolutionized our digital lives. You may even recognize that open web servers (Apache), open web browsers (Firefox), open office suites (OpenOffice.org), open course management systems (Moodle), open mobile applications (Android), open encyclopedias (Wikipedia), and open textbooks (Flat World Knowledge) are part of this revolution. Did you know that Google Maps is updated by volunteer cartographers?

I truly believe that the university we know will change radically in the next 10 years and will not exist in a form we are familiar with in 50 years. I'm not sure how long it will take for free and open online universities to not only exist but to be accepted by employers, but it's coming.

From the blog at College Open Textbooks, I learned about Einstein University. It may not be what University 2.0 or 3.0 will look like, but it is part of the change. It has no set schedule and volunteer professors who are not assigned to particular courses. All they have to do to maintain volunteer faculty status is to earn a certain number of points each quarter. They can earn these points by editing an open textbook, answering a student’s question, uploading a seminar or lecture, or submitting a test question. When and how volunteer professors decide to earn their points is totally up to them.

Instead of charging students tuition, Einstein University funds itself through ad revenue. If that seems impractical, look at Wikipedia (which is built on the same software) is one of the most visited websites and has only 35 employees. That is a 1:8,000,000 employee:user ratio - but it does have 90,000 volunteers.

Einstein University’s mission is to take OER to the next level by allowing individuals an opportunity to use these resources to earn college credit. The idea behind Einstein University is simple: instead of a company creating the course material, all of its content is created collaboratively, and instead of paid professors facilitating the courses, all of its faculty members are volunteers.

Einstein University is also a way for professors to volunteer and offers a place to create their open content.

Its interactive approach to open textbooks with each textbook having its own section for a chat room, discussion board, news, journals, seminars, lectures, papers, research groups, data and web resources.

The university also doubles as an academic social network where students and professors can share ideas, collaborate on research, and read each other’s papers.

Einstein University does have a plan for accreditation and hopes to eventually offer undergraduate and graduate degrees online for free. The immediate plan is to offer a 2-year Associate Arts degree in 25 different languages and apply for accreditation in some of the main countries that speak those languages. If successful, this would make higher education free for millions of people in the developing world who lack access to it. At the moment the university has minimal content, but over the next year it hopes volunteer professors will begin to add it.

MIT OpenCourseWare's spring fundraiser has begun. You can support their OpenCourseWare initiative with a gift in whatever amount.

They are marking ten years of providing free educational opportunities.Your support helps meet their ambitious goals for the next decade and ensure that millions around the world continue to benefit from open access to MIT's educational assets.


Visit https://giving.mit.edu/givenow/ocw/MakeGift.dyn to make your donation now.(You can make your donation count event more with a matching gift from your company. To find out whether your company has a matching gift policy, please enter your employer's name in the MIT matching gifts page.)

And if you have never looked at the free courseware that they have available, check out http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/

What have you always wanted to learn about and never got around to taking a course in?

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) wants you to get involved in organizing the next cycle of courses for 18 April.

If you've got an idea for a course, study group or workshop you'd like to participate in, simply create a course plan or view existing course drafts to see how fellow organizers are planning their courses. If you feel like you need more support in developing your course, we invite you to join the orientation where experts will be on hand to help you out.

Courses are scheduled to begin after 18 April, but feel free to propose start dates and course lengths that suit your schedule.

P2PU is a global community and platform for learning, where all activities are free and open. Together, we're teaching and learning everything from mathematics to web development to literature, using open educational resources and learning in study groups. P2PU is run by our global community of volunteers who believe that the best way to learn is from and with other people, no matter where in the world you are. P2PU uses peer learning and open content to scale quality education beyond the traditional institution.

For more information, visit http://p2pu.org