Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources

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Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
Formation2007
Founder Martha Kanter
Director
Una Daly
Parent organization
Open Education Global

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) promotes the awareness of open educational policies, practices, and resources. [1] CCCOER is part of Open Education Global. CCCOER describes itself as a community of practice fo open education, providing various resources, support, and opportunities for collaboration for learning, planning, and implementing successful open educational programs at community colleges and technical colleges. This support includes webinars, online advocacy events and conferences, a community email list, community blog, workshops and presentations throughout North America, as well as generally raising awareness of open education and supporting the needs of students and faculty at colleges adopting open educational resources and full degree pathways.

Contents

History

CCCOER was established in 2007 at the Foothill–De Anza Community College District by then Chancellor Dr. Martha Kanter. From 2007 to 2011, CCCOER's efforts focused on the College Open Textbooks Collaborative hosted at the Foothill–De Anza College District. [1] This project involved a train-the-trainer network of community college faculty and administrators, a catalog of over 750 open textbooks, and research on open educational resources (OER) impact on students and faculty at community colleges [2] .

In 2008, CCCOER collaborated with Rice University's Connexions, now called OpenStax CNX, to address the high cost and limitations of traditional publisher textbooks with a proof of concept open textbook. [3] [1]

In 2011, CCCOER became part of the Open Education Consortium (OEC), which is now Open Education Global [4] . CCCOER was the first community college system to join OEC [5] . In 2011, CCCOER also partnered with the OpenCourseWare (OCW) Consortium, to maximize and expand the impact of OCW to community college students, faculty, and learners [6] .

CCCOER includes membership of institutions and organizations that support openness, equity, and access in education [7] . As of June 2021, CCCOER membership includes 93 members across 35 U.S. states and Canadian provinces [8] .

See also

Related Research Articles

MIT OpenCourseWare Web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content

MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. The project was announced on April 4, 2001, and uses Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The program was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. Currently, MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors. The initiative inspired a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources.

Open educational resources Open learning resource

Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes.

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.

The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) is a consortium of Ohio's college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio. Serving more than 800,000 students, faculty, and staff at 88 institutions with 117 libraries, OhioLINK's membership includes 16 public universities, 23 community/technical colleges, 48 private colleges and the State Library of Ohio. OhioLINK serves faculty, students, staff and other researchers via campus-based integrated library systems, the OhioLINK central site, and Internet resources.

An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.

OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.

Open education

Open education is education without academic admission requirements and is typically offered online. Open education broadens access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems. The qualifier "open" refers to the elimination of barriers that can preclude both opportunities and recognition for participation in institution-based learning. One aspect of openness or "opening up" education is the development and adoption of open educational resources.

An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open copyright license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost.

The Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, was a web-based publication of educational material from a number of Tufts University courses, providing open sharing of free, searchable, high-quality course content to educators, students, and self-learners throughout the global community. The Tufts OCW initiative encouraged the publication and free exchange of course materials on the World Wide Web. First launched in June 2005, Tufts OCW provided materials with strong representation from Tufts’ health sciences schools, some of which were equivalent to textbooks in depth. All materials on the Tufts OCW site were accessible and free of charge. As Tufts OCW is not a distance learning program, no registration, applications, prerequisites, or fees are required and no credit is granted. Tufts ended funding for its Open Courseware initiative in 2014, and content on the Tufts OCW web site was removed on June 30, 2018.

Open.Michigan is a collection of open initiatives and projects at the University of Michigan (U-M). Open.Michigan supports the open access and use of U-M resources for teaching, learning, and research. Open.Michigan promotes open content licensing and supports the reuse, redistribution, and remixing of educational materials for use by others worldwide. Some of the key efforts underway under the Open.Michigan umbrella include U-M’s Open Educational Resources publishing activities, development of software tools that support creating open content, and various open content repositories.

Martha J. Kanter is the former Under Secretary of Education. She was appointed by President Barack Obama on April 29, 2009, and confirmed by the Senate on June 19, 2009.

Lyryx Learning (Lyryx) is an educational software company offering open educational resources (OERs) paired with online homework for undergraduate introductory courses in Mathematics & Statistics and Business & Economics.

FlexBook is a textbook authoring platform developed by the CK-12 Foundation. Launched in 2008, FlexBooks reduced the cost of textbooks for the K-12 market both in U.S and worldwide. Derived from the words "flexibility" and "textbook," a FlexBook allows users to produce and customize content by re-purposing educational content using different modules. FlexBooks can be designed to suit a learner’s learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards.

Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2002. Located in Half Moon Bay, California, its mission is to help schools, colleges, and other educational institutions to gather and use data, share information, and make knowledge openly accessible to students, educators, and the public.

OER Commons

OER Commons is a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.

Open Course Library (OCL) is an effort by the State of Washington to identify and make available digitally, to community and technical college instructors and students across that state, free textbooks, interactive assignments, and videos. Instructional materials can be "a smorgasbord of teaching modules and exercises developed by other open-learning projects.. . Interactive-learning Web sites and even instructional videos on YouTube. . ." However, OCL is not an OER publishing project, although it did contribute to the development of some widely used resources. Goals include: lowering textbook costs for students, providing new resources for faculty to use in their courses; and fully engaging in the global OER or open educational resources discussion.

Open Educational Practices in Australia refers to the development, implementation and use of Open educational resources (OER), open access, open learning design, open policies, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to open up education in Australia.

Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open education, open educational resources (OER), open pedagogies (OEP) and open educational practices (OEPr) that are established nationally and provincially across Canada, and extending to international collaborations.

TRAILS

In Montana, TRAILS is a statewide consortium of academic libraries which includes all 23 of Montana's public, private and tribal community colleges and universities. TRAILS serves over 49,500 students, faculty, researchers and community members, providing access to over 4,000,000 library items. The consortium is expected to save seven million dollars over a five-year period. TRAILS maximizes the return on resource investment, enhances teaching and research, improves the user experience, and encourages shared expertise among members of institutions across the state.

LibreTexts is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit online educational resource project. The project provides open access to its content on its website, and the site is built on the Mindtouch platform. LibreTexts was started in 2008 by Professor Delmar Larsen at the University of California Davis and has since expanded to 400 texts in 154 courses, making it one of the largest and most visited online educational resources. LibreTexts currently has 13 library disciplines ranging from chemistry to work-force to humanities.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "About Us – CCCOER". www.cccoer.org. Retrieved 2021-06-25.
  2. "About Us – CCCOER". www.cccoer.org. Retrieved 2021-06-28.
  3. "Judy Baker, Kathi Fletcher, Manpreet Kaur, and Jonathan Emmons - Open Textbook Proof-of-Concept via Connexions". www.irrodl.org. Retrieved 2021-06-26.
  4. "About Us – CCCOER". www.cccoer.org. Retrieved 2021-06-28.
  5. "Una Daly on the Expansion of OER at America's Community Colleges". Michelson 20MM Foundation. 2019-09-12. Retrieved 2021-06-28.
  6. "OCW Consortium Partners with Leading Community College Consortium, CCCOER, to Expand Access to Open Education | The Open Education Consortium". www.oeconsortium.org. Retrieved 2021-06-28.
  7. "Become a Member – CCCOER". www.cccoer.org. Retrieved 2021-06-28.
  8. "Members – CCCOER". www.cccoer.org. Retrieved 2021-06-28.