Project awards is a new category aiming to recognize efforts that support the production, use and/or promotion of OCW/OER in ways other than the creation and use of material resources.
2014 Project’s awards winners fall into two categories: 1) Creative Innovation, 2) Open Research.
- CREATIVE INNOVATION AWARD recognizes outstanding innovations that bring a new approach to Open Education. Ideas or solutions presented as sites, courses or projects that substantially improve the discoverability, presentation, usability, accessibility or availability of course materials.
- OPEN RESEARCH AWARD recognizes excellence in research studies about open education and/or related areas. Studies that help advance our understanding and demonstrate effectiveness related to challenges in discoverability, presentation, usability, accessibility or availability of OCW/OER. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is pleased to recognize these institutions and organizations for their efforts and contributions to free and open education.
CREATIVE INNOVATION WINNERS
SÉSAMATH
Sésamath is an association committed on making free educational resources and tools for teaching mathematics via Internet. The association is committed to the values of free use and free software, promoting the use of free licenses for documents and software.
Sésamath resources are created by volunteers, math professors and school teachers. The resources are created and discussed collaboratively on mailing lists, classroom-tested and improved over the use and feedback of the teachers. Once they reach a consensus the resources are made available on the Internet.
It is not necessary to be a member of Sésamath to participate in the creative process, but collaborators must be willing to work under a free license and open sharing state of mind.
SLIDEWIKI
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Darya Tarasowa, Ali Khalili, Sören Auer
SlideWiki aims to exploit the wisdom, creativity and productivity of the crowd for the creation of qualitative, rich, engaging educational content. With SlideWiki users can create and collaborate on slides, diagrams, assessments and arrange this content in richly-structured course presentations.
SlideWiki empowers communities of educators to author, share and re-use sophisticated educational content in a truly collaborative way. Existing presentations can be imported and transformed into interactive courses using HTML and LaTeX. All content in SlideWiki is versioned thereby allowing users to revise, adapt and re-mix all content. Self-test questions can be attached to each individual slide and are aggregated on the presentation level into comprehensive self-assessment tests. Users can create their own presentation themes. Slidewiki supports the semi-automatic translation of courses in more than 50 languages.
OPEN RESEARCH WINNERS
OER KNOWLEDGE CLOUD
Athabasca University
The UNESCO/COL OER at Athabasca University Knowledge Cloud greatly enhances research opportunities and access to knowledge and research on Open Educational Resources and related information by removing barriers, opening up scholarship and making research universally accessible. The OER Knowledge Cloud has been established to identify, collect, preserve and disseminate available documents of enduring value to researchers, industry, government, scholars, writers, historians, journalists and informal learners.
Benefits of the OER Knowledge Cloud:
- Powerful and efficient state-of-the-art searchable database;
- Free access to research initiatives, data, and other information on all aspects of Open Educational Resources
- Dedicated storage and management of a vast array of digital and other resources with professional database administration;
- Up-to-date source on latest developments in the OER field;
- Assistance in building research capacity in the region with the use of Gap Analysis to identify research overlap and gaps.
OER RESEARCH HUB
The Open University
The Open Educational Resources Research Hub (OER Research Hub) is an Open University initiative that provides a focus for research, designed to give answers to the overall question ‘What is the impact of OER on learning and teaching practices?’ and identify the particular influence of openness. They do this by working in collaboration with projects across four education sectors (K12, college, higher education and informal) extending a network of research with shared methods and shared results. OER Research Hub aims to have by the end of their research evidence for what works and when, but also established methods and instruments for broader engagement in researching the impact of openness on learning.
The project combines:
- A targeted collaboration program with existing OER projects
- An international fellowship program
- Networking to make connections
- A hub for research data and OER excellence in practice