The Center for Studies in Higher Education, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is conducting research to understand the needs and desires of faculty for inprogress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields, as well as their careers, our approach focuses in fine-grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including sharing, collaborating, publishing, and engaging with the public. Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions ased on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.

Our work to date has confirmed the important impact of disciplinary culture and tradition on many scholarly communication habits. These traditions may override the perceived "opportunities" afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category. As we have listened to our diverse informants, as well as followed closely the prognostications about the likely future of scholarly communication, we note that it is absolutely imperative to be precise about terms. That includes being clear about what is meant by "open access" publishing (i.e., using preprint or postprint servers for scholarship published in prestigious outlets versus publishing in new, untested open access journals, or the more casual individual posting of working papers, blogs, and other non-peer-reviewed work). Our research suggests that enthusiasm for technology development and adoption should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements (including the needs and goals of final archival publication) in highly competitive professional environments. Complete listing and access info »

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a large-scale, web-based electronic publishing initiative, accessible on the Internet at ocw.mit.edu. Through OCW, MIT makes its core teaching materials -- lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, reading lists, simulations, etc. -- openly available for non-commercial educational purposes. OCW publishes those materials in standards-based formats for anyone with access to the Internet. OCW has a dual mission:

* To provide free access to virtually all MIT course materials for educators, students, and individual learners around the world.

* To extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the opencourseware concept.

Beginning in 2002, MIT OpenCourseWare has published 1,259 of MIT's approximately 1,800 courses to date. In addition, OCW has published 133 updated versions of previously published courses. MIT OpenCourseWare expects to have published 1,800 courses by 2008, and beyond that milestone will continue to update courses as an ongoing activity of the Institute.

Major findings

* Access: Online access to MIT OpenCourseWare content continues to grow dramatically on ocw.mit.edu and on translation sites, with currently more than 1 million monthly visits to OCW content, and a 56% annual increase in visits.

* Use: The OCW site is being used by educators, students and self learners to successfully accomplish a wide range of educational objectives; and visitors are widely satisfied with the breadth, depth and quality of OCW content.

* Impact: Individual educators and learners report high levels of current impact on their learning goals, and expectations for even higher impact in the future; institutions worldwide are both using MIT OpenCourseWare materials and publishing their own materials openly -- with more than 2,000 courses representing over 50 institutions currently available online.

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This short paper is a contribution to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) expert workshop to help identify "motivations, benefits and barriers for institutions producing open educational resources". The motivations are examined by looking at the reasons behind the launch by the Open University in the UK of a web based collection of open educational resources, OpenLearn. OpenLearn launched on October 25th 2006 and reflects an initiative backed by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Open University to develop a learning environment (LearningSpace) and an accompanying educator environment (LabSpace) giving free access to material derived from Open University courses. There are of course many reasons for the taking part in open educational resources and so this paper considers motivations in community, organisational, technical and economic terms.

The paper was initially prepared for the OECD experts meeting on Open Educational Resources 26-27 October 2006 in Barcelona, Spain.

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The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is a new instrument designed to measure student beliefs about physics and about learning physics. This instrument extends previous work by probing additional aspects of student beliefs and by using wording suitable for students in a wide variety of physics courses. The CLASS has been validated using interviews, reliability studies, and extensive statistical analyses of responses from over 5000 students. In addition, a new methodology for determining useful and statistically robust categories of student beliefs has been developed. This paper serves as the foundation for an extensive study of how student beliefs impact and are impacted by their educational experiences. For example, this survey measures: that most teaching practices cause substantial drops in student scores; that a student's likelihood of becoming a physics major correlates with their 'Personal Interest' score; and that, for a majority of student populations, women's scores in some categories, including 'Personal Interest' and 'Real World Connections', are significantly different than men's scores. Complete listing and access info »

We give an overview of the Physics Educational Technology (PhET) project to research and develop web-based interactive simulations for teaching and learning physics. The design philosophy, simulation development and testing process, and range of available simulations are described. The highlights of PhET research on simulation design and effectiveness in a variety of educational settings are provided. This work has shown that a well-designed interactive simulation can be an engaging and effective tool for learning physics. Complete listing and access info »