Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

Dutton Institute has an OER initiative in place. We're looking at the official Penn State policy on courseware - the PSU lawyers have had their say making the policy more OER-friendly. David shows us his openly published textbook. There is a copyright agreement form available that will allow faculty members to open their content. Opening content can make PSU more competitive in an OER world - prospective students will have the chance to evaluate course quality. The value of being a tuition paying student is the collaboration with faculty, faculty evaluation and the credential offered. Dave's takeway - we can do this and we should, from a business point of view and from the pov of the university's mission.

Keith brings up challenges - standards, faculty buy-in

David DiBiase makes a compelling argument for making lots of PSU's course-related intellectual property "open" for others to use. I accept his point that doing so will probably lead to benefits and increased enrollments, if he quality of the content we make available is good. He argues that students will still enroll in our courses even if the content is available, because what students really want is access to the professors and the certification that Penn State provides. I agree. But I think that there is another very valuable asset that should be added to the list, if we are teaching well.

Beyond Availability
There have been increasing levels of discussion among OER producers, users, and re-users that having OER content available is simply not enough. In addition to being available content has to be useful, meaning that it is:
• Easily identified
• Consistently and transparently licensed
• Easily localized
• Easily shared
• Etc.

There is also a societal context as illustrated in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration in which the dialog is shifting from content to education: http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

Following this is serious discussion around institutional adoption of OSS and OER principles within the university, in effect creating a new university model. For example: