Call for Papers

Open Education 2010
OER: Impact and Sustainability
7th Annual Open Education Conference
November 2-4, 2010
Barcelona, Spain

http://openedconference.org/2010/

The field of “open educational resources” is in its second decade. There have been many experiments, many introductions, many subsidies and grants acquired to discover what OER is and how it can be used, and many tryouts in a multitude of settings. From these thousands of seeds that were planted and the thousands of flowers that have sprouted and bloomed only a few have proved hearty enough to survive and propagate. At the same time, new and exciting things are just beginning.

It is time to make the step from small scale R&D / implementations to larger scale implementation and evaluation based upon working business models and show the world (government, industry, general population) that we have matured from an alternative movement to the stage that sustainable learning and learning practices can be achieved based upon our work.

Existing and new projects must now address long-term issues of sustainability and accountability. Funding agencies that were so helpful when OER was a new and sexy idea have now gone onto newer and sexier topics leaving existing projects to develop sustainable business models to continue their existence and forcing new projects to consider this from the get-go.

In recognition of the coming of age of OER, this year’s Call for Proposals is organized around seven strands:

  • Long term sustainability of open education projects
  • International copyright and intellectual property rights issues
  • Lessons learned from Open and Distance Learning for the Open Education movement
  • How OER differ from other digital educational resources.
  • Open education policy and strategy
  • Best cases in OER
    • Are they designed differently (do standard design principles like the split attention effect apply?)
    • Are they used differently (do standard practices for effective use of media apply?)
    • What’s really different about OER?
    • Do they deserve a separate label?
  • Open Ed on the cheap

Submission Instructions

Submit a tweet-sized abstract (140 characters or less) and a proposal (500 words or less) describing your topic, project, or research by May 15, 2010 via the online submission system.

All submissions and presentations must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0). By submitting a proposal you agree to these terms.

Acceptance announcements will be made during the week of June 7, 2010. All presenters are required to register for the conference.

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance decisions will be made based the proposal’s Relevance, Significance, Originality, Quality and Clarity.

A submission is RELEVANT when

  • it directly address one or more of the conference strands

A submission is SIGNIFICANT when

  • it raises and discusses issues important to improving the effectiveness and/or
  • sustainability of open education efforts, and
  • its contents can be broadly disseminated and understood

A submission is ORIGINAL when

  • it addresses a new problem or one that hasn’t been studied in depth,
  • it has a novel combination of existing research results which promise new insights, and / or
  • it provides a perspective on problems different from those explored before

A submission is of HIGH QUALITY when

  • existing literature is drawn upon, and / or
  • claims are supported by sufficient data, and / or
  • an appropriate methodology is selected and properly implemented, and / or
  • limitations are described honestly

A submission is CLEARLY WRITTEN when

  • it is organized effectively, and / or
  • the English is clear and unambiguous, and / or
  • it follows standard conventions of punctuation, mechanics, and citation, and / or
  • the readability is good

Questions?

Email:
David at david.wiley@byu.edu