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Session 14
The Application
of Flintbox Services: An Open Education Resources Repository
Project Objective:
This project proposed to
leverage the Flintbox capacity to achieve a pan-Canadian
approach to the open curriculum movement as illustrated by the
MIT Open Course Ware initiative. The project would enable and
encourage the use of a special branded or labelled portion with
in Flintbox to house post secondary curriculum. This content
then could be accessed by other post-secondary systems or
institutions – likely in developing countries – to use. This
project proposed focus on technical Vocational content as it is
seen to having the most immediate application in developing
countries. Content would first be sought from Members of the
Canadian Virtual College Consortium (http://www.cvcc-cccv.ca/
) lead by Red River College, Vancouver Community College, and
the Newfoundland Marine Institute.
Background:
While not the only initiative
that is exploring the sharing of educational resources
internationally, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open
Course Ware project (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm)
was one of the first and has been recognized globally. Its site
has been visited by 31 million visitors a year – more than 2
million a month. What this project and other initiative in the
open resources activities around the world is how to share
educational resources to other learners. Through this initiative
MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through
knowledge open to everyone. It shares free lecture notes, exams
and to educational resources from more than 1800 courses across
its institution. But it is not an MIT education. It does not
grant any credentials or access to faculty or all necessarily
all material or content of a course.
Concurrent to the MIT project, there are many other activities
around the world exploring how to accomplish a sharing of
educational resources. The author of this proposal, a graduate
of the International Institute for International Institute for
Educational Planning & Administration (IIEP) in Paris, France,
has been in contact with a project that started in IIEP and has
since moved to UNESCO. A UNESCO Community of Interest on Open
Educational Resources was formed in 2005 at the end of a formal
Internet discussion forum on Open Educational Resources: open
content for higher education. This forum was the third of a
series organized by the UNESCO International Institute for
Educational Planning (IIEP) to examine key issues related to the
use of Information and Communication Technologies in higher
education. The forum series and subsequent work on OER took
place in the context of IIEP's "observation" function to explore
new trends in education. It is hoped that that initiative can be
connected with this project to ensure a global context for it
evolution.
Project Outline /Method:
The project proposed to be a
pilot. It was to target technical vocational curriculum content,
which is seen to be in high need around the world. For the
pilot, members of the Canadian Virtual College Consortium would
be facilitated to mount some of their curriculum content in a
special developed Open Education Resources' area of Flintbox. If
successful, the project could expand to other CVCC members and
to other post secondary institutions across Canada. At the
on-set , given the various values different post secondary
attach to their curriculum , individual institutions will be
allowed to contract the use of those materials and even charging
for some of it use but the general guiding principle will be
that such posted materials can be accessed freely.
Presenter: Paul W. Little,
Dean, School of Learning Innovation,
Red River College of Applied Arts, Science and Technology
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