[Oer-community] Using OCW/OER as a platform

[Mary Lou Forward]

There have already been several comments about using OER as a platform to
reach educational goals in different aspects of society. We wanted to focus
today's discussion on *Using OCW as a platform*. Dr Bassem Khafagy urged us
to think creatively about developing a model where OER is
supported/maintained as a social good, valuable to many sectors. A few
interesting examples to consider:


 *Governmental encouragement of OER for workforce training:* The US
Government hosted a White House Summit on Community Colleges on Tuesday of
this week (http://www.whitehouse.gov/communitycollege). During the closing
remarks, the Secretary of Labor talked about two billion dollars in grants
that will be available over the next four years to support job skills
updating and workforce training, primarily for US community colleges, and
including materials developed/released as OER.


 *Community-driven OpenCourseWare development:* The town of Manor, Texas is
planning to develop OpenCourseWare in open government and topics that meet
needs identified by community members. To provide incentives for suggesting
OCW topics, and for using OCW once developed, the town offers a certain
number of “innobucks” that are granted virtually and can be exchanged for
real goods and services offered by local businesses. www.manorlabs.org;
conference presentation at
http://www.slideshare.net/OCWConsortium/opencourseware-meets-manorlabs


 *Collaborative approaches to OER: *African Virtual University has an
ambitious Teacher Education Program that brought together educators from 10
countries to co-create materials in a highly collaborative project.
Materials created are usable and adaptable by any institution, and will soon
become available to all through AVU's OER library.
http://www.avu.org/Teacher-Education-Programme/teacher-education-programme.html
.


 Other ideas have been shared by colleagues on this list already. We would
love to hear more of your thoughts on how OER and OCW can be used to meet
educational goals such as lifelong learning, workforce development,
curricular development, etc. What can be done now, and what might we have to
do before we can realize other goals?


 Mary Lou




-- 
Mary Lou Forward
OpenCourseWare Consortium
www.ocwconsortium.org
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