Are you curious about the notion of open educational resources? Is it just another way of saying open courseware or open content? There is a new report from Susan D’Antoni and her team at UNESCO that goes some way to answering the above questions. There is an online version that you can explore and edit.

The report is the output of deliberations by a community of 600 interested stakeholders from across the globe who corresponded via a mailing list between 2005 and 2007 (how time flies!). The UNU was one member of this community.

I am really impressed by both the report and the way that UNESCO has developed this project - it is community based, interactive and uses open technologies, such as wikis. In my view, this is a good model for other United Nations sponsored projects.

I borrowed the slide from the Open Content Holistic Research Environment blog.

No this post is not about protecting the environment. Instead, I would like to point you to a recent report from the American University Center for Social Media entitled “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User Generated Video.” Authored by Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jasz, the report shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration.

Fair use is very important for the educational sector and is the part of copyright law that permits new creators, in some situations, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying the owners. The report is focused on experience in the United States and recommends that a special committee be established to develop best-practices principles, similar to those found in the documentary film-makers statement of best practice in fair use.

The e-case study concept emerges as a combination of the case study method of teaching and e-learning. The basic idea is to use different types of interactive multimedia to support the salient features that make up the strengths of the case study method.
In this paper I give a brief overview of the case study method, and then explain the particular way in which the e-case study model supports its salient features to deliver an effective media supported learning experience.
Download whitepaper