This paper presents a novel approach to designing an online, open-source course in systems librarianship, an area of librarianship that may be perceived as complex and intimidating because of the technologies involved. The course design focuses on making systems librarianship more approachable for library and information science students who may…

This report presents the activity systems analysis of the general MOOC design process adopted by a multidisciplinary team for delivering edX courses to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This report builds on Freire's (2020) exploratory case study [EJ1275469], which applied work-based learning theory and activity systems theory to determine…

The Open University (OU) makes a proportion of all its taught modules available to the public via OpenLearn each year. This process involves the modification, of module excerpts, showcasing subject matter and teaching approach. This activity serves both the University's social and business missions through the delivery of free courses to the…

Since the publication of the IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) specification in 2003, many initiatives have been undertaken to build authoring tools that are simple enough to be used by non-technical instructors and teachers. IMS LD's technical complexity is believed to be a major burden for the adoption of the specification. We have developed a new…

With today's rapid developments in digital technologies, technical obsolescence can occur much faster than in the past. Who would have predicted five years ago that Adobe's Flash would have seen the rapid decline it has experienced as a development environment? Using open, internationally accepted standards for materials development is…

Flipped course is used in well-developed educational institutions and technologically developed countries. It is quite experimental in nature for resource restricted educational institutions and developing countries. In this paper such cases are considered, where faculties make use of free resources available for conducting flipped courses.…

Value-based delivery of healthcare has been discussed in the literature for almost a decade. The concept focuses on the patient and defines value as the improvement of patient outcomes divided by healthcare costs. Further refinements, called the Triple Aim model, focus on improving patient outcomes, reducing treatment costs, and improving patient…

After providing access to over 100 video interviews conducted by a professor with notable entertainers and personalities from film through an institutional repository, an experiment was conducted to discover whether a larger audience could be gained by adding a subset of 32 of these videos to YouTube. The results, over 400,000 views, indicate that…

India and China are two fast growing economies of the world and need large skill based manpower to sustain the economic growth. The existing formal higher educational system in these countries will not be able to meet the demand of the economy. The paper will try (i) to compare the development of economy and distance education in India and China…

The diffusion of the use of the learning virtual environments presents a great potential for the development of an application which meet the necessities in the education area. In view of the importance of a more dynamic application and that can adapt itself continuously to the students' necessities, the "U-ALS" (Ubiquitous Adapted Learning…

The technology of the 21st century has had no shortage of challenges for libraries, but it has also brought opportunities. Operating systems, databases, and application environments that can use cheap off-the-shelf hardware to scale and handle hundreds of millions of transactions were not developed for libraries. However, libraries have taken…

An important element of open educational resources (OER) is the permission to use the materials in new ways, including revising and remixing them. Prior research has shown that the revision and remix rates for OER are relatively low. In this study we examined the extent to which the openly licensed "Flat World Knowledge" textbooks were being…

Approximately 15 states are changing their policies to give school districts more flexibility in acquiring content. They have changed laws or policies or have bills pending in state legislatures to redefine "textbooks". Most of those changes are similar to the approach Indiana took in its new law: a "textbook" is not only a…

Textbooks too often hinder rather than help students because of their prohibitively expensive prices. Colleges and universities facing intense pressure to lower education expenses while increasing access, retention, and achievement now find addressing the textbook problem more and more urgent. Used textbook sales have grown dramatically over the…

Educational institutions are increasingly adopting "closed" learning environments that hide learning materials in password-protected areas. While this may be a logical solution to a range of problems, much is lost in this mode of course delivery. Although there are logical reasons for moving toward closed environments, we may be erring…