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Virginia Open Education Foundation (VOEF) is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation that promotes open education to bring curriculum and educational content to the K-12 students of the Commonwealth of Virginia. It was started and is currently directed by Middlesex County Public Schools Technology Director Mark Burnet.
VOEF aims to establish a Creative Commons database of educational resources produced by private and public funding and aligned to the Virginia Standards of Learning. These resources would then be used by individual school systems through print on demand technology for paper textbooks and would be accessible online through content management systems. The foundation advocates that switching to open source content would lower costs, improve student access to materials, and give local schools more control over instructional content.[ citation needed ]
In January 2007 VOEF worked with State Delegate Christopher Peace to propose to the House of the General Assembly Joint Resolution 702, [1] which would form a joint subcommittee to consider open education implementation in the Commonwealth. This bill was eventually scrapped in favor of an Open Education Resources [2] advisory committee within the Joint Commission on Technology and Science. [3] This committee first met in Richmond on June 20, 2007. [4] Members were interested in lowering costs, providing materials to a broader group of learners, and speeding the process of content distribution via electronic delivery and print on demand.
For the 2008 session, a full subcommittee was formed. [5] An early priority was to unlock some of the production and procurement processes for school textbooks in both K-12 and higher education. To this end, VOEF submitted a proposal to Peace that culminated in work by the Virginia Department of Education to create Virginia House Bill 137, [6] which redefined textbooks to include all electronic versions so as to remove restrictions to paper-bound volumes. The bill passed unanimously in every vote, and was signed by Governor Tim Kaine on March 7, 2008. [7]
In conjunction with VOEF, Chris Peace introduced two more bills in January 2009. The first, HB1940, [8] would authorize the establishment of open education resource centers. Such centers would be able to be either privately or publicly funded, but the legislation would expire if no funding is provided within two years. The second, HB1941, [9] is a proposal that would encourage educational materials produced by the state to be released under a Creative Commons license.
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. 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.
A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textbooks and other books used in schools. Today, many textbooks are published in both print and digital formats.
Timothy Michael Kaine is an American lawyer and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Virginia since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 70th governor of Virginia from 2006 to 2010, and as the 38th lieutenant governor of Virginia from 2002 to 2006. Kaine was the Democratic nominee for vice president of the United States in the 2016 election as Hillary Clinton's running mate.
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.
Richmond Public Schools is a public school district located in the independent city of Richmond, Virginia. It is occasionally described locally as Richmond City Public Schools to emphasize its connection to the independent city rather than the Richmond-Petersburg region at large or the rural Richmond County, Virginia.
Textbooks in Israel and the Palestinian territories have been an issue within the larger Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
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.
Robert Edward "Edd" Houck is an American politician and educator. He served in the Senate of Virginia 1984–2012, representing the 17th district in the Virginia Piedmont as a Democrat for more than two decades.
The Global Text Project (GTP) is a not for profit organization dedicated to the creation, translation, and distribution of free open content textbooks over the Internet. It is an open educational resources project focusing on reaching university students mainly in developing countries, where textbooks are often expensive and not affordable. Textbooks are necessary and crucial for higher education, but they are becoming increasingly expensive, even in the United States. Between 1998 and 2014 textbook prices increased by 161 percent. And since 1977, textbook prices in the country have risen 1,041 percent, more than triple the overall rate of U.S. inflation. Two major reasons that could be affecting textbook prices are the constant publication of new editions, and extra material bundled into the textbooks.
An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open 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.
Frederick Carlyle Boucher is an American politician who was the U.S. representative for Virginia's 9th congressional district from 1983 to 2011. He is a member of the Democratic Party. He was defeated in his bid for a 15th term by Republican Morgan Griffith in the 2010 elections.
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.
Benjamin Lee Cline is an American lawyer and politician who has served as the U.S. representative for Virginia's 6th congressional district since 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he represented the 24th district in the Virginia House of Delegates from 2002 to 2018.
FlatWorld is a publisher of college-level textbooks and educational supplements for a worldwide audience founded in 2007 as Flat World Knowledge by Eric Frank and Jeff Shelstad. It was acquired at the end of 2016 by Alastair Adam and John Eielson and its company headquarters was moved from Washington, DC, to Boston, Massachusetts. Following this acquisition, the company rebranded as FlatWorld.
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.
FlexBook is a textbook authoring platform developed by the CK-12 Foundation launched in 2008, focused on textbooks for the K-12 market. 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.
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.
Virginia Allen Crockford was an American educationalist. She was a member of the Richmond School Board from 1962 to 1972, and served as board chair from 1968 to 1972.
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.
Ruby Lee Grant Martin was an American lawyer and government official. She was director of the federal Office for Civil Rights, appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson. She won the Federal Woman's Award in 1968 for her work on school desegregation.