OpenLearn
OpenLearn is the British Open University 's contribution to the Open Educational Resources (OER ) project. It is partly funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OpenLearn is a member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium ( OCWC ).
History
The Open University published the OpenLearn website in October 2006 to make the world to educational material freely accessible. The publication of these structured learning materials that have been designed for distance learning, is unique in the Open Educational Resources field.
Principle
Open Education gets involved in three areas. It makes new knowledge available to everyone ( not just for the few who pay for it ). It allows users to download the material, modify, translate and adapt to enhance its usefulness. It offers the possibility in a continuous cycle of improvement in the areas of modification, development, testing and re- development, and testing work together collaboratively and cooperatively (with modified material ). The use of Open Educational Resources aimed at the resolution of global restrictions on access to knowledge and educational opportunities.
Through the virtual Moodle -based learning environment learners are offered over 400 structured and multimedia learning units. These are enriched through a variety of learning and communication tools in the learning environment. Instant messaging, video conferencing, video - blog and forum Internet allow the development of learning groups consisting of many learners, thousands of lessons and learning materials. Knowledge mapping software provides learners with the learning material and represent the cross-connections in visually. This argumentation and debate can not be assigned better. The publication of the work made in the learning material to the learner on the website shows the progress / changes of all persons involved in the material in question.
Furthermore, one can also extract the contents and re- composed to represent them in a new form. The Web 2.0 approach towards a free and co-operative learning environment ( Learning Space ) for learners is complemented by the LabSpace, where experts to download, improve and customize both - requires encouraged - current and all archived teaching materials. The multimedia materials of the Open University, published under the Attribution-ShareAlike -NonCommercial Creative Commons license, can respect other teaching contexts reused, be transformed, translated and expanded to create a larger free source of secondary teaching materials. Contributors are encouraged to try their own area in LabSpace be formulated to personalize the teaching materials to increase the relevance of the content for specific learning communities to test out new ideas for teaching and develop on feedback from users based teaching materials.
Viral content
OpenLearn enables viral content not only through its licensing model, but also by the commitment to open technologies. The use of a virtual open-source learning environment along with the possibility that people learning materials in various formats downloaded or can upload, supports the duplication of the content and allows interoperability with other providers of content management systems. The learning materials were implemented in standard software libraries to provide globally distributed communities access. The content can be easily embedded with RSS feeds into web-based widgets and RSS reader to use the contents away from OpenLearn.
LabSpace Hosting
At the end of the first phase of funding (30 April 2008) OpenLearn included more than 5,000 hours teaching materials from the Open University. In addition, user -generated content still further in LabSpace.