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The Open Education Consortium is an NGO run by individuals, organizations and educational institutions that advocates for the use and development of open source educational tools. Their work is based on empowering people through the access of high-quality education. The Open Education Consortium strive to raise awareness through networking events, community discussion, conferences, workshops and so forth. The main goal is to provide support for students and educators by advocating and the open-access of educational materials such as scholarly articles and collaborative learning communities. On their website, they provide educational tools to be used by interested faculty members, students, course administrators, policy makers and researchers. There is a portal provided by the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) which includes a list of free and open textbooks to be used in a variety of disciplines. Most of the open access textbooks provided are suitable to be used in community college courses but are not limited to students of such institutions and have Creative Common open licenses or are listed under the GNU-Free Document license. The Open Education Consortium is officially registered in the United States as a NGO for social benefit, though they operate worldwide in advocacy for globalization.

Open Educational Resources

Mission and Vision

"We envision a world where everyone, everywhere has access to the high quality education and training they desire; where education is seen as an essential, shared, and collaborative social good." The Open Education Consortium has created an online community for the empowerment of open learning. They believe that openness does not mean just obtaining access to educational tools, but allowing students, workers, educators, researchers, and others to modify and edit information through peer-collaborative work. By providing open-access of knowledge and information, it allows for a potential solution to the many challenges and barriers in society as the current procurement of education is limited, making resources scarce and restricted to institutionalized groups.

History

In 2005 the OpenCourseWare launched the OpenCourseWare Consortium which is now named, the Open Education Consortium. What had started as a concept has evolved to a movement which involves over 300 higher education institutions and organizations, thousands of open access textbooks, courses and a large-scale globalized effort to adopt open education resources in the discipline for worldwide education.

OER (Open Educational Resources)

In 2002, the term Open Educational Resource was first coined at a UNESCO meeting on Open Courseware. Though OERs may be defined in many working definitions, the Hewlett Foundation provides an extensive description: "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

The Changing Dynamic of Learning

Creative Commons Logo

From an article written in 2015, authors Kristi Jensen and Guill West discuss why open education is the pedagogical shift that is also a movement for sharing. As open education resources are not confined by strict copyright laws and restrictive principles that might inhibit one's ability to obtain learning material and distributing the material, Jensen and West explain how open education works not only to improve learning experiences but also reflects that the "more materials are shared, the more the world is better". In the article, Jensen and West refer to David Wiley, a Chief Academic Officer at Lumen Learning, an organization dedicated to the success of students, the innovation of pedagogy and the affordability of education through the implementation of OERs. OERs are educational materials where a person can exercise five rights. Wiley states that the five rights are known as the five Rs: retain, revise, remix, redistribute, and reuse. Only when the educational materials or tools are in the public domain or are made available with a licensing tool such as a Creative Commons license, it makes the five rights accessible.

Traditionally, education was limited to certain people with a higher socio-economical status due to restricting production, reproduction and distribution costs. Now, though it still takes time and labour costs to produce a course, technology has improved to make reproduction and distribution costs almost non-existent. Researchers, professors or content creators can make their information and data available to millions which can create a universal movement to better the quality in education for learners. In Caswell, Henson, Jensen and Wiley’s research on the enabling universal education, they talk about the Creative Commons license which they argue can help the OER movement. Every time material is created and licensed under Creative Commons, there is potential for the material to be utilized in an educational atmosphere. There are countless producers involved in the open education movement but many of them are unaware. For instance, in Utah State University’s OpenCourseWare courses, most of the images found and used originated from Flickr using the Creative Commons search. The images were not originally taken for open educational practices although due to the open license, people around the world can utilize the content to implement into their educational materials. On OpenCourseWare, materials are not only free to use, but the altercation and constant re-editing is encouraged as it improves the content and makes it more credible. Many of the resources licensed under the Creative Commons allow for the remixing, distribution and reusing of materials.

Board of Directors

The Open Education Consortium is comprised of representatives that are elected from associated institutions. The board of directors collaborate on projects with their diverse insight and strategic direction from different parts of the globe. Each year, the Nominations Committee would solicit nominations for the vacant board seats that run from February to March. Elections for the board committees run from March to April by online ballots. The Open Education Consortium staff includes the roles that help facilitate open-source projects and community initiatives. The active staff members of the 2017/2018 calendar year are: Susan Huggins, (Communications Director), Marcela Morales (Director of Community Relations), Igor Lesko (Executive Director & Director of Operations), Una Daly (Director of CCCOER), Jure Cuhalev (Web Developer) and Noriaki Castillio (Web Designer).

The Globe

Each member of the Board of Directors is elected to represent member institutions from different countries. The active 2017 Board of Directors include the countries:

Australia

• Allyn J Radford represents the Australian Computer Society and holds the title for a business and education executive with experience in inventive infrastructure and business models and solutions. As a member of the Board of Directors for IMS Global, he has participated developing several learning technology standards. Radford’s main area of interest is the utility of technology for learning purposes and he has been involved in the discipline for nearly 30 years. Radford has a passion to integrate transformational and open education models for the populations in emerging economies.

Brazil

• Starvos Panagiotis Xanthopoylos is the Brazilian Associate for Distance Education. As of 2017, he is an advisor and a representative of the executive committee for a project called, ROER4D (Research for OER in the Developing South), which is a research project that is funded by IDRC. Xanthopoylos holds a PhD in Business Administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas and most of his research is related to Knowledge Management.

Canada

• Amanda Coolidge represents BCcampus and is the Senior Manager for Open Education. She works actively for open education projects in British Columbia and leads the BC Open Textbook Project. She has a background in Educational Technology and Instructional Design. Coolidge hosts workshops to raise awareness about the adoption and adaption of OERs to instructors in the province of British Columbia and globally.

France

• Papa Youga Dieng is the Coordinator of the Initiative Francophone pour la Formation à Distance des maîtres (IFADEM) and has been working for the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) since August 2010. Dieng works to lead and develop e-learning programs and has published textbooks on chemistry and physics for secondary-school use.

Indonesia

• Tian Belawati represents Universitas Terbuka (Indonesia Open University) and she has had experience in teaching, research and administration of an open university system, which aids over 400,000 students in Indonesia and abroad. Her career started in 1985, where she had joined Universitas Terbuka, her job being an editor. She has worked with others to innovated though UT Online, using tools such as open educational resources, online tutorials, online examination systems, digital libraries, integrated IT system for learning materials development and additional ICT-based advancement for teaching, learning and academic administration.

Japan

• Naoko Tosa is the President of the Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium. She has been involved with the Open Education Consortium since 2005 and is one of the six founding members of JOCW. In 2006, Naoko Tosa organized the Open Courseware Conference. Tosa received her PhD for Art and Technology Research from the University of Tokyo and lectured at Musashino Art University. Additionally, she was a researcher in the Media Integration & Communication Lab in Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory. As of 2017, she works as a professor at Kyoto University.

Netherlands

• Williem Van Valkenburg is the Vice President of the Board for Delf University of Technology. Valkenburg has been a component of the Open Education Consortium since 2008 and he is responsible for the production and distribution aspect of OpenCourseWare, DelftX MOOCs, online Professional Education and various online BSc and MSc programs.

South Africa

• Laura Czerniewicz is an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town. She has a long history of open access education and open scholarship. Her research interests are the technologically-mediated practices for students and academics, the changing nature of upper education environments, the geo-politics of knowledge and open education. At the University of Cape Town, Czerniewicz holds the title as the director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching.
• Igor Lesko is the Executive Director and Director of Operations at the Open Education Consortium. Lesko is a PhD candidate at Open Universiteit Nederland which is under the Global Graduate OER Network. His focus of research involves open policies and open educational resources.

Taiwan

• Yu-Lun Huang represents the Taiwan Open Course Consortium. As of 2017, Huang works as the Associate Dean of National Chiao-Tung University (NCTU) Academic Affairs, Director of Center for Continuing Education and Training and Director of Centre for Learning and Teaching Development at NCTU. Her areas of research include secure payment systems, wireless security, virtualization of security, embedded software and operating system, risk assessment, critical information infrastructure protection and creative innovative teaching models.

United States of America

• Barbara Illowsky is the Chief Academic Affairs Officer of the Open Education Consortium. She operates as the Dean of Basic Skills and Open Educational Resource for the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiatives and represents the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. Illowsky is the co-author of “Collaborative Statistics” and “Introductory Statistics” which are open textbooks that were published by OpenStax College that are offered at no cost. She is also the first Project Director of CCCOER.
• James Glapa-Grossklag is a Dean of the Learning Resources, Educational Technology, and Distance Learning at College of the Canyons in located in California, USA. Grossklag is also the past President of the Board and Treasurer for the Open Education Consortium and also the previous President of the CCCOER. His extensive educational career before College of the Canyons include teaching at a university in Poland and studying in Germany. He has also studied at Illinois Wesleyan University, University of Chicago, the University of Cologne (Germany) and Cornell University. His area of research focuses on evidence collection and distance learning.

Institutional Support

Students Learning Digitally

The Open Education Consortium’s activities are funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation with the additional support from a variety of members. Each year, the number of contributing member organization increases. As of December 2017, the sustaining sponsor members of the Open Education Consortium includes: The African Virtual University, Community College Consortium for Educational Resources, Delft University of Technology, Fundação Getulio Vargas – FGV Online, Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Netease Open Courses, Open Universiteit, Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, Taiwan Open Course Consortium, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Tufts University, Universia, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, University of California, Irvine and University of Michigan.

Projects and Initiatives

Open Education Week

The main goal of the Open Education Week is to create discussion and raise awareness about open educational resources, opportunities and issues regarding OERs. The event is created to help people recognize how OERs could improve educational settings, work settings and develop the necessary skills and knowledge for looking for credible open sources.

Penn State Berks

At the University of Penn State Berks, the students and faculty celebrated Open Education Week from March 27th to 31st in 2017. As an institution that is already a leader in developing open educational tools, Penn State Berks had displayed their interactive open textbook on display at the Boscov-Lakin Information Commons which is in the Thun Library. Director of the Centre of Teaching and Learning (CLT), Daonian Liu states that, “all open education activities are part of a strategic initiative to reduce the cost of earning a degree at Penn State”. The CLT has coordinated with the faculty of Berks’ to design open educational resources in significant research topics such as accounting, economics, international business, Spanish, chemistry, mathematics and biological science. Students from other countries have also used Penn State Berks’ learning modules according to Mary Ann Mengel, an instructional multimedia designer. She said, “the Spanish tutorials have generated much positive response and led to our recent expansion of that library – Our accounting modules received a 2014 Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) Award as an exemplary online learning resource”. Mengel also talked about the importance of online educational resources as something that can be constantly improving as there are opportunities for redesigning and interaction, “unlike a printed textbook which is static”.

Global OER Graduate Network

The Global OER Graduate Network was started in 2012 by the UNESCO chair in OER at the Open University of the Netherlands with the collaborative efforts of the UNESCO/COL/ICDE in OER at Athabasca University, located in Canada. The two main goals for the Global OER Graduate Network is to raise awareness for open education research for open educational tools and to provide support for the PhD researchers that are part of the OER movement. So far there are 7 alumni or PhD graduates from 6 countries that are involved in the Global OER Graduate Network and 42 PhD researchers registered at universities from 15 countries. A list of the countries include: the United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada, India, The Netherlands, South Africa, Nigeria, Portugal, Spain, Australia, Brazil, France, Switzerland, Ireland, China, Sweden, Turkey, Fiji and Rwanda. Researchers in the network focus on their own field of interest across various sectors with a focus on the openness in education. An example may include content analysis, digital learning, resources in rural areas, research in STEM disciplines and other developmental studies.

Open Education Global Conferences

About

The Open Education Global Conference is an annual networking event where innovators and collaborators around the world meet to discuss, reflect, innovate, challenge and celebrate open source resources and its impact on global education. Global leaders, educators, researchers, and other innovators have informational sessions to talk about topics that relate to open access education such as policy implementation, practical resolution solving, and research findings. The event is hosted for three consecutive days and takes place at a different city each year.

Open Education Awards for Excellence

During the reception period of the Open Education Global Conference, the Open Education Awards for Excellence awards members in the community in recognition for their outstanding contributions. The Open Education Consortium celebrates, acknowledges and motivates the individuals that have impact or supported the movement through their own practices or research. The individual winners are selected by votes from the OEC Board of Directors. Award categories are reviewed annually to ensure that the awards are current, relevant and reflect the hard work dedicated by the selected candidates and one award is granted for each classification. The categories for the OE Awards include: Individual Awards, Student Awards and Open Resources, Tools & Practices Awards.

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)

Established in 2007, the CCCOER promotes the use of open access educational tools in community college settings. Their mission is to empower faculty, staff, educators and students with open textbooks and high-quality resources, making learning less expensive. There are over 250 technical and community colleges affiliated with the Open Education Consortium and they are represented across 17 different states and provinces in North America. In 2001, the CCCOER officially partnered with the Open Education Consortium.

Criticism for the OEC

One of the main limitations for the OEC is the substantial voluntary human labor that is put into creating the open educational resources. Without the lack of collaborative initiatives and constant advocacy for open educational resources, the content, course and curricula would not be as effective. In an article written by David Raths, a writer dedicated to topics about information technologies for CampusTechnology.com, he talks with Cable Green, a director of open education at Creative Commons and an advocate for open access resources. Green argues that sharing information and creating discussion is the main goal of providing open access to textbooks, knowing that very few faculty members generate a profit on textbooks and journal articles, “If the reason you are doing research is to share the ideas, to share the science with other people, if they can’t read it, what is the point? The only way to be read is to make it open. There are some antiquated barriers we have in the education system. In higher education, our promotion and tenure rules are outdated – there are some barriers we have to clear out of the way.” Green’s perspective about open education stems from the strategy development for OER implementation on a global scale.