Open Education:What, Why, How?

Shimelis Assefa

sassefa(at)du.edu

Open/Openness?

• Open access to research data

• Open scholarly communications

• Open access to, and open derivative use of, content

- Educause Quarterly, 32(1), 2009

In the beginning – there was – Open Source

Richard Stallman started the GNU project in 1983/4

How did we get here?

On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds posted this famous message to a newsgroup:

Hello everybody out there using minix -I'm doing a (free) operating system

(just a hobby, won't be big and professionallike gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. …

I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix….

The result is – Linux OSin 2008 – 60% of web servers ran Linux

Do you know:

At present, it's estimated that only 2% of Linux code today was written by Linus

Torvalds himself, although he still "owns" the Linux kernel.

What does this mean?

So, what is Open Education?

A collective effort to improve education

through:

Open Technology,

Open Content, and

Open Knowledge

- Opening up Education, MIT Press (2008)

A key tenet of open education is that education can be improved by making

educational assets visible and accessible and by harnessing the collective wisdom of a community of practice and reflection.

- From Opening up Education, MIT Press (2008)

Modern Biology Course

From OpenLearniningInitative, CMU

PhET

Physics Education Technology from UC Boulder

Why Open Up?

• The focus is not so much on what we learn but on how we learn.

• How we learn and how we teach has changed.

• Reinforce learning outside of formal schooling.

• Expand the Learningscape.

By analogy with Open Source, Open Access to the research literature entails the

freedom to read, use and redistribute the published results of scholarly research and

derivative works based on those publications.

What?

Open access to more than half a million E-prints

Committed to make the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource.

E-scholarship,

E-Research,

E-Publishing.

This resulted in…

Impact

Authority

Immediacy

Visibility

Scale

Prestige

Time-stamp to establish priority over other researchers working on the same problem.

Why Open Access?

In 2009, submission to fast-track review and on-line publication in 7 days!!!

Compare PLOS Biology and Nature or any other prestigious biological journal

by going to the following site – to see ranking and article influence.

How?

Institutional Infrastructure – Open Technology, Policy, …

The consent of the author or copyright-holder

The shift from

“All rights reserved”

to

“Some rights reserved”

How?...

Watch the following one minute video to learn Why a Physician Scientist thinks Open Access

is important

Any Questions?

Thank You!!