OER for credit for students

I have been working with Open Educational Resources over the last few years and have been drawn more closely to the work of the OER foundation.  At the moment, there is an interesting project taking shape around the idea of an OER university and a project to provide free and open educational opportunities which result in credentials for participants.

The OER university is a “sustainable international system which will provide free learning to informal learners with pathways to gain academic credit from formal education institutions around the world. It is rooted in the community service and outreach mission of tertiary education providers to evolve parallel delivery systems (now possible with the open web and free content licensing of learning materials) that will augment existing educational provision. The OER University is an open network and public-private partnership (PPP) including post-secondary institutions, the private sector, non-profits, government and international agencies.”

The project has specific aims to:

• provide free learning opportunities to all students of the world
• be a virtual collaboration which will list credentials and formal education institutions that provide assessment and credit pathways for formal academic credit at reduced student fees.
• Offer courses and programmes based entirely on open education resources and open textbooks licensed under free cultural works approved open content licenses.
• Foster open access research and publication for the dissemination of scholarly outputs and integration into the research-led curricula.
• implement scalable systems of volunteer student support through community service learning approaches.
• Promote the design and teaching of courses utilising open pedagogical approaches to facilitate networked learning.
• Use free and open source software for its administration, collaborations.
• not be a formal teaching institution and does not confer degrees or qualifications — but works in partnership with formal education institutions to provide credit for OER learning on the web.

It is an ambitious project … which relies on the input of folks like you.  In particular, there is a meeting coming up  in February to discuss the development of mechanisms to offer formal credentialing via the OER university.  For a brief sketch, have a look at this page on WikiEducator.  If you are interested in participating in the project, if you represent an institution or group (e.g. postgraudate students, a flexible learning provider) or if you just want to learn more about the project, there is a particular project forming under the guidance of Professor Jim Taylor of the University of Southern Queensland and Wayne Mackintosh of the OER Foundation…see the planning page here to register your interest.