While digital products have made significant inroads into the educational resources market, textbooks and other print materials still command about 60 percent of sales. But whether print or digital, all of these commercial offerings now face threats from a burgeoning effort to promote "open" resources for education--that is, materials…

Kenya, like many African countries, has faced enormous challenges in the production of and access to quality relevant teaching and learning materials and resources in primary and secondary school classrooms. This has been occasioned by a plethora of factors which include, but are not limited to, lack of finances, tradition, competence, and the…

Many observers find it baffling that faculty in higher education have been slow to adopt open educational resources (OER). The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a private foundation that makes grants to expand access to learning materials, defines OER as: Teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been…

"Open educational resources" (OER) are educational resources that are available to anyone free of cost and under an open licence to allow others to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute them with few or no restrictions. In 2012, the World OER Congress saw the adoption of the Paris OER Declaration, which calls on governments…

The study derives from a multi-year project implemented by OER Africa. The project sought to understand how OER might be used as a catalyst for pedagogical transformation in African universities. Within a nondeterminist and interpretivist theoretical framework and an over-arching project methodology of participatory action research, the study made…

Open educational resources are not available "as such". Their provision relies on a technological infrastructure of related services that can be described as an informational ecosystem. A closed informational ecosystem keeps educational resources within its boundary. An open informational ecosystem relies on the concurrence of…

Access to quality educational materials is a challenge in many parts of the world, including in some developed countries. The emergence of open educational resources (OER) is a landmark development in the history of education. OER support the notion of knowledge as a social product and education for all as a human right. The Commonwealth of…

Lofty ed-tech visions are always tempered by reality. Unexpected problems that arose during a launch of a 1-to-1 computing program and ambitious digital curriculum initiative in Los Angeles led to the dialing back of the effort. Financial, legal, and managerial repercussions continue to swirl in the wake. These problems should not prevent schools…

In the past year, Open Educational Resources have been a focus of policymakers and stakeholders in North Dakota. As a result, North Dakota University System (NDUS) faculty are more aware of the term open educational resources (OER) than their counterparts in national public institutions and all sectors of higher education. In addition, North…

J. Michael Spector's academic preparation was in philosophy--epistemology and logic, primarily. His dissertation was on skepticism in modern philosophy, and that led him to a deep-seated appreciation for classical skepticism. The word "skeptic" is derived from the Greek word "skepsis," which means investigation. While the…

Arguably, the benefits of open educational resources (OER) are greatest in low- and middle-income countries, where they have the potential to increase access to learning for those who may otherwise be excluded. However, for OER to be truly useful to educators and learners they need to be adapted to suit the contexts in which they are to be…

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer unique new opportunities for educators to share quality learning resources, especially in an increasingly digital world. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), providing them with the unprecedented advantage of being able to share resources that are…

These proceedings contain the papers of the IADIS International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2013), October 22-24, 2013, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), co-organized by The University of North Texas (UNT), sponsored by the…