As reported on the Chronicle of Higher Education Web site, the University of Massachusetts Amherst announced a grant process to lower the cost of textbooks for students. Eight faculty members were awarded a total of 10 grants, $1,000 per course, to adopt a new curricular resource strategy using easily identified digital resources. Under the program, faculty [...]
Category Archive for 'Policy'
An interesting and disturbing decision was made by officials at Georgia Tech. They have decided to take down all student content from a GT-hosted wiki platform called Swiki after declaring that information disclosed on the openly available wiki infringed the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). That wiki initiative was one of the [...]
The promise of cost-cutting electronic textbooks is far from becoming reality. Although they are usually cheaper than their paper counterparts, they also have serious restrictions attached to them, the most important one being an expiry date. Indiana University announced a couple of weeks ago that they successfully negotiated an agreement with leading e-text publishers to cut costs [...]
Rant Against Academic Publishers Cites Self-Publishing As A Potential Solution
Posted in OER, Policy, Repository on Aug 30th, 2011
A recent article on the Guardian website by George Monbiot is making waves in social media. Monbiot claims that publicly-funded research should be available for free, not through expensive subscription or pay-per-article models. What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for [...]
Teachers Fight Back Against Missouri’s New Social Media Law
Posted in Policy, Social Media on Aug 22nd, 2011
The state of Missouri has passed a law to prevent teachers from friending students on social media sites. Senate Bill 54, also known as the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act, aims to fight inappropriate contact between students and teachers, including protecting children from sexual misconduct by their educators. It is named after a Missouri public [...]
Stickiness in Social Media and Centrally-Supported Systems
Posted in LMS, Policy, Social Media on Jun 22nd, 2011
My good friend Nate Angell from rSmart moderated a session called “Sakai vs the World Wide Web 2.0: To Facebook or Not to Facebook?” at the 2011 Sakai conference in Los Angeles. He does not know that, but I’m the one who “planted” that topic as a potential session for the conference, and he’s the [...]
Open access to Yale’s digital image library
Posted in OER, Policy, Repository on May 17th, 2011
Yale University announced that they are making their 250,000 digital image library freely available on the web. See this slideshow that showcases some of the images that were released to the public. According to Cory Doctorow’s post and comments, “high resolution” might be exaggerated (most images are 700 pixels in width, making them unsuitable for [...]
Different open education projects, different licenses
Posted in Faculty Practice, OER, Policy on Apr 1st, 2011
In higher education, intellectual property is crucial. What we produce is mostly knowledge, and knowledge objects can be digitized and propagated at the click of a mouse. In a recent post on the Creative Commons site, Paul Stacey, Director of Communications, Stakeholder and Academic Relations at BCcampus, argues that educators in his system are better [...]
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