Friday, March 03, 2006

Next UNESCO Virtual Conference on Open Educational Resources Susan D'Antonio announces the followup conference on OERs. Professionals who would like to participate in this conference should send a message to virtual.university@iiep.unesco.org. _____JH ______ Dear Colleagues,   Next steps   On Monday March 6th we will begin an informal examination of the main issues identified by the group as important.   This stage of open informal discussion on a number of specific topics will continue until July, with one topic per month.  In September, we will have another structured forum which will focus on the draft report of the OECD study on OER undertaken by the Centre for Education Research and Innovation (CERI).   The first month will actually be an exercise to reflect on research needs and to create a research agenda for OER.  Peter Bateman of the African Virtual University and Kim Tucker of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research will act as facilitators during the discussion and will assemble the results of the deliberation into a document at the end of the discussion.   Participating   Not all of you may be interested in actively following the discussion on all topics so we suggest two options.     Option 1 – you can remain in the group and receive and send messages.   Option 2 – you may request to be taken temporarily off the list for the discussion of a specific topic.  But at the end of the session, we will send you a copy of all documents produced, and you will be invited to link back with the group for the discussion of the next topic.   This approach will ensure that you remain a member of the Community of Interest on OER, but only take active part when you are interested or able to devote the time.  You will always receive all reports or documents produced.   Participation in the March discussion of building a research agenda   If you do NOT want to take active part in the discussion and only want the summary report, please reply to this message right away and ask to be temporarily removed from the list.   A point of clarification   Further to my message of yesterday…anyone you know who would like to know more about our OER Community of Interest or join, can write to this address, virtual.university@iiep.unesco.org.  We continue to try to balance developed and developing country participation.   Tomorrow we will send out a reminder about how the discussion list operates, and how to access the archives.   Best regards, Susan   _______ Dear Colleagues, We hope that you found the report of the forum useful as an overview of our interaction so far.  Now we are ready to move forward with an informal discussion of several specific OER related topics of interest and concern to our community. The topic to be addressed over the next month is building a research agenda for OER.  As you will recall, this was raised in the third session of the forum.  It is an important deliberation for an international community to undertake.  And we count on all of you to reflect upon your own situation and to consider where studies would be helpful to provide information to support informed decision-making on the development and use of OER. There are three general points I would like to make as we move into this next stage.  First, I would urge that we make an effort to achieve more geographic balance in the discussions – that means that some who have been silent need to speak up, and some who have spoken up need to be quieter.  If our deliberation is to be representative of our community, it is important to hear from most of you.  Second, we are linking all of the community (almost 500) in this ongoing discussion.  We will try this and see if the level of messages is acceptable, especially to those with limited mailbox sizes.  Remember that you can choose to receive the ”digest” format that will assemble all messages each day into one, if that is best for you.  A message with details will be sent shortly. Third, I would like to remind you again to help build awareness of both the OER movement and our community.  The issue of promoting the OER movement was an issue raised by many of you in the final session of the forum.  Please share information with other colleagues who might be interested.  They are welcome to join in the current discussion and they can refer to all the Background Notes and Summary Reports on the web site http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/forums.php. We are looking forward to getting back together,  Susan Susan D'Antoni Virtual Institute International Institute for Educational Planning 7-9 rue Eugene Delacroix 75116 Paris France tel   33 1 45 03 77 16 fax  33 1 40 72 83 66 web http://www.unesco.org/iiep web publication http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/ _______     9:05:39 AM    COMMENT []