https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/03/11/open-education-week-2015
Open Education Week 2015
Posted by on March 11, 2015 at 09:17 AM EDT
As we celebrate Open Education Week 2015,
we look forward to implementing the new U.S. Open
Government Partnership National Action Plan to promote Open
Educational Resources and building momentum for Federal open education
initiatives. The availability of high-quality, low-cost digital content in our
schools is a priority for the President and a pillar of his ConnectED
Initiative. Fostering the use of Open Educational Resources in our
nation’s K-12 and post-secondary classrooms can help meet this goal.
Open
Educational Resources are learning tools that reside in the public domain or
that have been released with intellectual property licenses allowing their free
use, continuous improvement, and modification by others. Open Educational
Resources can deliver two great benefits for students: lower cost in obtaining
the educational resources needed to succeed in school, so that students and
schools can redirect funds for other instructional needs; and access to a
universe of high-quality, updated content that can be tailored minute-by-minute
by educators to reflect new developments and current events.
The Department of Labor has been at the
forefront of advancing Open Educational Resources. The Department
recently developed new granting policies for its Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and
Training Grant Program (TAACCCT), which aims to expand
post-secondary education and training capacity. For the first time, the
Department has incorporated requirements for grantees to openly license all
educational content created with grant funds, promoting institutional
collaboration and sharing of Open Educational Resources. Since the program’s
inception, grantees at over 700 colleges have launched over 1,500 new programs
of study, including degree and certificate programs that prepare students for
careers in emerging and expanding industries. By requiring all content,
curricula, and learning objects created using TAACCCT funds be licensed using a
Creative Commons Attribution license, the Department of Labor is investing in the
world’s largest collection of Open Educational Resources.
The Department of Education’s Learning Registry project
is another example of Federal efforts to increase the discoverability of open
educational content, particularly for use in K-12 contexts, by aggregating and
sharing data about online educational content through an open source platform.
Several states, including Illinois and California, have built
portals that allow educators to search, save, and share Learning Registry
resources from institutions including the Smithsonian, National Archives, and
NASA.
In
the coming year, we will continue to build on these successes at the Federal
level as we look to promote the use of Open Educational Resources. Current
plans include launching an Online Skills Academy to leverage free and
openly-licensed learning resources and using technology to create high-quality,
low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, and other employer-recognized
credentials. In addition, the Department of State will conduct three overseas
pilots to examine new models for using Open Educational Resources to support
learning in formal and informal contexts. The results of the pilots will be
shared later this year at a workshop – co-hosted by the Department of State,
the Department of Education, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy –
on challenges and opportunities in open education.
We
look forward to working together to advance these initiatives.
Sara Trettin is Digital
Engagement Lead in the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department
of Education.
Dipayan Ghosh is a
Policy Advisor in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer at the Office of
Science and Technology Policy.
Nicole Allen
Director of Open Education
Director of Open Education
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing &
Academic Resources Coalition
21 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 800
21 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
+1 (202) 750-1637
nicole@sparc.arl.org
+1 (202) 750-1637
nicole@sparc.arl.org
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