Launched in 2002 by WGBH, the non-commercial public media service, located in Boston, Massachusetts, Teachers' Domain is an online repository of multimedia open educational resources for use in classrooms and for professional development. As part of its effort to increase the availability of freely accessible resources WGBH has developed content from public media archives into high quality, open educational resources for Teachers' Domain. Using a participatory case study methodology, this report examines WGBH and Teachers' Domain's successes and challenges in 1) converting proprietary content to open content 2) engaging users in content and 3) redesigning the Teacher's Domain site to accommodate new categories of use and tools for teachers and learners of all different backgrounds and activity levels. For OER projects more generally, ongoing research on user behaviors, experiences and perceptions can be a challenging and resource-intense process; however, by assessing and building data collection mechanisms and research questions into organizational practices, knowledge and learnings can be cultivated to inform how users are best supported, as well as to inform continuous improvement for the projects overall. Complete listing and access info »

This rights assessment evaluates the feasibility of converting the contents of WGBH's free online educational resource collection Teachers' Domain (http://www.teachersdomain.org) to open content status. It employs a two-pronged approach -- (1) categorizing and determining licensing costs for the website's already-existing media assets, and (2) researching and identifying challenges and solutions to licensing issues.

For this report, WGBH identified all of the media assets and elements (the pieces that comprise a given asset) within the Teachers' Domain science collections, researched the rights holders and licensing agreements associated with each one, and created a classification system to identify rights status. This made it possible to determine the action necessary to shift each asset toward open content status, and to estimate the associated costs (if any). This research also mapped the potential difficulties and the opportunities for progress in this area. Complete listing and access info »

What makes an educational resource "open"? Is it enough that resources are available on the World Wide Web free of charge, or does openness require something more?" These questions have become more urgent as the open education movement has gained momentum and as potential users of open educational resources (OERs) increasingly face uncertainty about whether permission is required when they translate, reuse, adapt, or simply republish the resources they find.
With the support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, ccLearn surveyed the copyright licensing policies of several hundred educational projects or organizations on the Internet to assess whether these legal conditions limit the usefulness of self-designated open resources from the user's perspective.

The study reveals three principal findings:

• The copyright licenses or terms of use associated with some OERs are difficult to find or to understand;
• The majority of OER projects or organizations have adopted a standardized license created by an independent license provider, and of these, the large majority have adopted one or more of the six Creative Commons copyright licenses ("CC licenses") to define the terms of openness. But, a sizable minority of OER providers have chosen to craft their own license -- often borrowing terms from one of the standardized licenses. Thus, as a group, OER providers have adopted a diverse, and often customized, set of license conditions that in some cases require significant work by users to understand;
• The usefulness of OERs as a group is limited by incompatible license conditions that functionally prohibit combination or adaptation of OERs provided by different sources.

This report concludes with a recommendation that creators of open educational resources consider using CC licenses to provide users with readily found, standardized terms of use. It recommends further that OER creators consider adopting the most open of CC licenses, the Attribution-only License (CC BY), to nourish the creativity of educators and learners alike by allowing the adaptation, combination, and republication of OERs from multiple sources.
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This paper examines the effects of substituting a computer simulation for real laboratory equipment in the second semester of a large-scale introductory physics course. The direct current circuit laboratory was modified to compare the effects of using computer simulations with the effects of using real light bulbs, meters, and wires. Two groups of students, those who used real equipment and those who used a computer simulation that explicitly modeled electron flow, were compared in terms of their mastery of physics concepts and skills with real equipment. Students who used the simulated equipment outperformed their counterparts both on a conceptual survey of the domain and in the coordinated tasks of assembling a real circuit and describing how it worked. Complete listing and access info »

OpenER is een project van de Open Universiteit waarin Nederlanders drempelloos toegang hebben gekregen tot hoogwaardige zelfstudie-cursussen: gratis, zonder in te schrijven en volledig online. Na 1,5 jaar OpenER is er een schat aan informatie over omvang en aard van de belangstelling, mogelijke functies en al dan niet beoogde effecten. Complete listing and access info »