What OER means to Technical Workforce Programs at Bellingham Technical College
by Lesley Ann Wallace
We have a tight community of technical instructors whose heads are spinning just watching the amount of jargon building up in the open educational movement that has little or no value to their workforce initiatives. With academia touts like, “ try this tool… or this eBook…or our website…or…,” ahhhhhhhhhh, these technical instructors shrugg their shoulders and suggest that any movement regular academia is making into FREE, looks too time consuming and too irrelevant for them to even get involved.
Why should they when our technical instructors already have curriculum that works and much of it created on their own anyway. Most instructors in the technical fields rarely, if ever, rely on textbook knowledge for content delivery. Basically, their declarative information is around new field standards and regulations that arise, therefore, a great deal of technical program teaching is procedural information and for the most part instructors create their own materials through project based learning. As a group BTC technical program instructors took a frustrated, roll your eyes, look at all of the OER “stuff” coming in from academia, so useful and so free, then decided enough of this malarkey!
Through professional community conversations at BTC we came up with our own definition of OER-we figure that if the movement’s mission is to share with little or no cost and technical instructors throughout the state have self created learning objects/modules they are willing to share, then why don’t we just start there? Using Washington State's adopted LMS (ANGEL) to open up a few system wide repositories in automotive, diesel technologies, and welding, BTC instructors starting putting content up this Winter quarter so that this Spring we can share it out and ask other instructors in the state to join in.
What makes this such a simple idea is our shared state wide LMS. Technical instructors all over Washington are already using it to enhance program delivery, meaning this makes it simple for instructors in other colleges to see what we have shared, know how we have shared it becasue of ANGEL and then can jump on board if they like. Once BTC instructors jumped, it was easy to keep going, now they look forward to opening up the effort system wide. Instructor Russ Jones, in welding said, “Sure, I want to see other ideas. Why should I invent the wheel if it is already out there? This let's me improve it or adapt it or even share back my own design.”
Washington State Community and Technical Colleges are known front runners in the OER movement. BTC technical program instructors just figured out how to redefine OER in terms of their own teaching and learning efforts. So do you want to come with us?
For more information contact:
Lesley Ann Wallace, elearning, lwallace@btc.ctc.edu
Russell Jones, Welding Technology Instructor, rjones@btc.ctc.edu
Dan Beeson, Automotive Technology Instructor, dbeeson@btc.ctc.edu
Jeff Curtis, Diesel Technology Instructor, jcurtis@btc.ctc.edu.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Creative Commons Announces Support Program for Department of Labor C3T Grantees
Creative Commons is pleased to announce we have been awarded a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide support to successful applicants of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (C3T) grant program with our partnering organizations Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.
The free of charge technical assistance services will provide a competitive advantage for organizations seeking C3T grant funds and ensure that the open educational resources created with these federal funds are of the highest quality. The partnering organizations will provide the following areas of expertise: open licensing, learning and course design, professional development, and adoption and use. C3T applicants interested in these free services should include boilerplate language in their proposal. This suggested language, as well as a high-level description of services, can be viewed at http://creativecommons.org/taa-grant-program
Creative Commons is excited to participate in this groundbreaking effort and grateful to The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its generous support in facilitating open learning.
*****
Updated April 13, 2011
Creative Commons is pleased to announce we have been awarded a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide support to successful applicants of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (C3T) grant program with our partnering organizations Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI), CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC).
Applicants interested in partnering with Creative Commons for this support should incorporate the following paragraph into their C3T proposal:
Aligned with Section III D of the SGA “Leveraged Expertise,” [enter applicant name] will partner with Creative Commons, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. These highly experienced organizations will provide comprehensive infrastructure support and capacity building along the following dimensions:
- Creative Commons is the global leader in open content licensing and will provide technical support in meeting the open licensing requirement and ensuring interoperability of C3T funded content.
- Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative brings expertise in applying results from the learning sciences to the design, implementation, evaluation and continuous improvement of open web-based learning environments.
- CAST is a pioneer in the field of Universal Design for Learning and will offer grantees technical support and enabling technologies to ensure that all of the digital content and learning environments developed in this project succeed with the widest range of learners possible.
- The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges is one of the leading community college systems in the nation fully embracing open educational resources and open licensing, and will develop best practices in adoption and use, policies and professional development that work for participating institutions.
Services will be coordinated through Creative Commons, at zero budget impact to [enter applicant name].
Good luck with your applications! Creative Commons will contact all successful grantees after the first round winners are announced. More in-depth detail on services will be provided after the DOL announcement. Questions should be directed to TAA@creativecommons.org
------------------------
High-level description of services
The partnering organizations will provide C3T grantees a comprehensive set of support and technical assistance to ensure their success. Those services include reinforcing open licensing practices, increasing access to existing open educational resources (OER), Universal Design for Learning (UDL), accessibility and web-based design best practices, as well as professional development in critical policy and adoption practices. Every effort will be made not only to link grantees with existing resources, but also to encourage linkages among them to maximize benefits and build open licensing capacity in the community college space.
Open Licensing Support: Creative Commons will lend technical support in meeting the open licensing requirement and ensuring interoperability of content. Creative Commons will explain its licenses and tools (especially CC BY) to grantees, and provide both explanatory documentation and outreach to help institutions understand and effectively implement this requirement.
Course Design and Best Practices: OLI and CAST will provide expertise and enabling technologies to ensure that all of the digital content and learning environments developed in this project are designed to succeed with the widest range of learners possible.
Web-Based Learning Environments: Plus Platform and Plus Co-Development: OLI and CAST will offer two additional options for deeper involvement in building web-based interactive environments. Institutions selected to participate in the “Plus Platform” option will have access to OLI's web-based learning platform to host their own open educational resources. A group of multiple subgroups will be selected for “Plus Co-development” support and engage in a full design process for OER resulting in 3-4 complete learning environments created and hosted on the UDL-enhanced OLI web-based learning platform.
Making the Case: Policy and Best Practices: SBCTC will utilize its system-wide experience in adoption, re-mix, re-use and distribution of OER to help grantee institutions develop best practices and policies that take full advantage of the C3T grants and process. SBCTC will help grantees understand the direct connections between OER adoption and performance-based funding. SBCTC will develop and provide professional development on adoption and re-use of C3T open content for faculty, deans, provosts, presidents and trustees.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Finding Good OER; Recap
Tom Caswell shared a number of links during his excellent presentation yesterday. Here is a summary list:
In case you missed the presentation, here is a link to the recording:
https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-04-05.1536.M.1286F0C21FA258F7D83EE80B8FA025.vcr&sid=2008170
In case you missed the presentation, here is a link to the recording:
https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-04-05.1536.M.1286F0C21FA258F7D83EE80B8FA025.vcr&sid=2008170
Monday, April 4, 2011
Creative Commons - A Shared Culture
This 3-minute video explains the idea behind Creative Commons. The non-profit company has created a series of free licenses to allow people more choices in sharing their creative works with others. Want to create your own Creative Commons license? Go to http://creativecommons.org/choose/, answer 2 questions, and you're done!
The above video by Creative Commons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
The above video by Creative Commons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)