Related Research Articles
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of books or individual stories in the public domain. All files can be accessed for free under an open format layout, available on almost any computer. As of 3 October 2015, Project Gutenberg had reached 50,000 items in its collection of free eBooks.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, it was accepted by the General Assembly as Resolution 217 during its third session on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France. Of the 58 members of the United Nations at the time, 48 voted in favour, none against, eight abstained, and two did not vote.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a merging of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was launched in 2000 and is reported as of 2020 to be the second largest charitable foundation in the world, holding $49.8 billion in assets. On his 43rd birthday, Bill Gates gave the foundation $1 billion. The primary stated goals of the foundation are to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty across the world, and to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology in the U.S. Key individuals of the foundation include Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett, chief executive officer Mark Suzman, and Michael Larson.
JSTOR is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a conference convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute on December 1–2, 2001 to promote open access which at that time was also known as Free Online Scholarship. This small gathering of individuals has been recognised as one of the major defining events of the open access movement. As of 2021, the text of the initiative had been translated to 13 languages.
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA), one of the largest private youth organizations in the United States, has policies which prohibit those who are not willing to subscribe to the BSA's Declaration of Religious Principle, which has been interpreted by some as banning atheists, and, until January 2014, prohibited all "known or avowed homosexuals", from membership in its Scouting program. The ban on adults who are "open or avowed homosexuals" from leadership positions was lifted in July 2015.
OpenStax CNX, formerly called Connexions, is a global repository of educational content provided by volunteers. The open source platform is provided and maintained by OpenStax, which is based at Rice University. The collection is available free of charge, can be remixed and edited, and is available for download in various digital formats.
Virginia Open Education Foundation (VOEF) is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation dedicated to bringing curriculum and educational content resources to the K-12 students of the Commonwealth of Virginia through open education. It was started and is currently directed by Middlesex County Public Schools Technology Director Mark Burnet.
The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a legally non-binding resolution passed by the United Nations in 2007. It delineates and defines the individual and collective rights of Indigenous peoples, including their ownership rights to cultural and ceremonial expression, identity, language, employment, health, education, and other issues. Their ownership also extends to the protection of their intellectual and cultural property. The Declaration "emphasizes the rights of Indigenous peoples to maintain and strengthen their own institutions, cultures and traditions, and to pursue their development in keeping with their own needs and aspirations." It "prohibits discrimination against indigenous peoples," and it "promotes their full and effective participation in all matters that concern them and their right to remain distinct and to pursue their own visions of economic and social development".
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information, is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work.
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather than an encyclopedia. Like Wikipedia, it is available in many languages.
The CK-12 Foundation is a California-based non-profit organization which aims to increase access to low-cost K-12 education in the United States and abroad. CK-12 provides free and customizable K-12 open educational resources aligned to state curriculum standards. As of 2022, the foundation's tools were used by over 200,000,000 students worldwide.
Open educational practices (OEP) are part of the broader open education landscape, including the openness movement in general. It is a term with multiple layers and dimensions and is often used interchangeably with open pedagogy or open practices. OEP represent teaching and learning techniques that draw upon open and participatory technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. Because OEP emerged from the study of OER, there is a strong connection between the two concepts. OEP, for example, often, but not always, involve the application of OER to the teaching and learning process. Open educational practices aim to take the focus beyond building further access to OER and consider how in practice, such resources support education and promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning. The focus in OEP is on reproduction/understanding, connecting information, application, competence, and responsibility rather than the availability of good resources. OEP is a broad concept which can be characterised by a range of collaborative pedagogical practices that include the use, reuse, and creation of OER and that often employ social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, empowerment of learners, and open sharing of teaching practices.
This outline of open educational resources provides a way of navigating concepts and topics in relation to the open educational resources (OER) movement.
The Rhodes University Library is committed to the pursuit of knowledge by connecting people to resources that contribute to the intellectual development of future responsible citizens. The overarching goal of Rhodes University Library is to develop and maintain efficient, reliable and responsive library and scholarly communication services that promote, support and enhance the research, teaching and learning endeavours of Rhodes University.
The UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration, otherwise known as the Paris declaration on Open Educational Resources, is a declaration urging governments to promote the use of open educational resources (OERs) and calling for publicly funded educational materials to be released in a freely reusable form.
Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open education, open educational resources (OER), open pedagogies (OEP), open educational practices (OEP), and open scholarship that are established nationally and provincially across Canadian K-12 and higher education sectors, and where Canadian based inititatives extend to international collaborations.
Open access to scholarly communication in South Africa occurs online via journals, repositories, and a variety of other tools and platforms. Compared to other African nations, open access in South Africa has grown quickly in recent years.
Open access in New Zealand consists of policies and norms affecting making research outputs, data, and education materials openly available. This is influenced by tertiary education institutions as well as national government and changing international norms. The New Zealand Government has applied open access principles to its own work, adopting the New Zealand Government Open Access Licensing Framework (NZGOAL). It has not mandated that these apply to schools or the tertiary sector or to research funding agencies. Some tertiary education institutions have developed their own open access guidelines or policies but neither of the two major research funding agencies in New Zealand—the Marsden Fund and the Health Research Council—have done so, unlike Australia, Canada, Europe or the United States.
References
- ↑ "OLCOS and the Cape Town Open Education Declaration". OLCOS. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
- ↑ Cape Town Open Education Declaration
- ↑ Wales, Jimmy; Baraniuk, Rich (22 January 2008). "Bringing open resources to textbooks and teaching". The San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on April 4, 2017.
Late last year in Cape Town, we joined delegates from around the world as we reached a consensus on both the ideals and approaches to Open Education and committed them in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which was released officially today.
- ↑ wmf:Minutes/2007-12-11
- ↑ "View Signatures". The Cape Town Open Education Declaration. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
