Call for Papers

Original Photo by: anguila40 / Alejandro Groenewold

Open Education 2009: Crossing the Chasm

Sixth Annual Open Education Conference
August 12-14, 2009

The Call for Papers is now CLOSED. Thanks to everyone who submitted. We will be contacting the accepted papers as soon as possible.

Some things are bound to change, projects have matured, and senior leadership has changed at many of the pioneering Open Education organizations. Some good things must come to an end - like grant funding. And some exciting things are just beginning: in the last year we have seen special issues of journals dedicated to open education, the publication of books about open education, and the creation of other conferences focused on open education.

The field of “open education” is in its second decade. There is ever more interest from new participants, with all the questions and challenges that such involvement brings. Existing projects must now address long-term issues of sustainability and accountability. And early adopters, who once made colleagues gape dumbfounded when they talked of freely sharing their content  are asking a new generation of questions that induce unbelieving stares.

In recognition of the different needs of participants in these various stages of innovation in Open Ed, this year’s Call for Proposals is organized around these three broad “strands.”

Open Ed - Startup Camp

• Making The Case
  • Who are the key people that need to be on board to start an OER project? What are some of the key arguments for enlisting their support
  • What are the key pieces that need to be addressed when starting a new OER project?
• Technology Choices
  • What are some of the best practices in publishing OER that have emerged, and how do these relate to different educational and content production models on individual campuses?
  • How can openness become a platform for educational technology reform inside the institution?
• Licensing and Intellectual Property Issues
  • What solutions are there to common intellectual property concerns raised around OER projects?
• Lessons Learned
  • What are the pain points for new institutions launching OER projects? Are there ways to avoid these or is there a natural growth pattern for OER projects?
  • How can new OER projects draw on and partner with allied movements such as free culture, new media culture, public and community-oriented education and activism?
    

Open Ed – Sustaining Steps

• Openness and the University’s Core Mission
  • Can we flip our perspective on openness from focusing first on “the world” with secondary, accidental benefits for our campus communities, and instead use openness to serve our campus communities first, with secondary benefits for “the world”?
  • What specific, practical benefits can openness create for the campus community? Can campus-focused efforts toward openness pay for themselves through cost savings and increased efficiencies?
  • How can openness be made to serve the university’s core mission so that it can benefit from the university’s core funding?
• The Technology of Open Education
  • What technical capabilities are required to support a broad program of open education, including open educational resources, open assessment, awarding credits, and bundling credits into credentials or degrees?
  • What comes after the LMS?
  • Can faculty ever “catch up” with the technical expertise of their students? If not, what is the future of the use of technology in education? What role can openness play?
  • How can technology choices foster architectures of participation? What do these new directions suggest about how we approach teaching and learning?

Open Ed – The Future

• Degrees and Certifications
  • How can we provide recognized credentials to learners at no cost? Can we sustainably give away credits like we give away content?
  • How can a student learn from a number of places (mixing and matching university courses and OER collections), learning from the best professors and peers, and bundle these into a legitimate degree?
  • What is the appropriate role of open educational resources in competency-based degree models like the Western Governor’s University?
• Assessment and Evaluation
  • How can openly shared assessment items maintain their construct validity?
  • How will openly sharing assessment items affect accreditation?
  • Can we evaluate, rate, or judge OERs or open assessment items in ways that will be meaningful for all possible consumers of the evaluation data? If not, what is the proper role of evaluation in a world of open education?
• Administration and University Services
  • How does a comprehensive collection of OERs change the accreditation process? Can a university program reach a level of openness and transparency where accreditation becomes unnecessary?
  • How does a comprehensive collection of OERs change the nature of student advising? the drop rate both on campus and in distance learning programs?
• Open Teaching
  • Is open teaching meaningfully different from traditional distance education?
  • Which models of open teaching work well for the instructor? How do they scale? Do they place too many demands on the instructor? Do instructors continue “open teaching” after their first experience?
  • Which models of open teaching work well for the students? What kind of experiences do unaffiliated learners have? What are their attitudes toward these courses? Are they learning?
• Openness and National Competitiveness
  • In an environment where nations and businesses compete for the best and brightest minds, do large-scale programs of open education (including the sharing of open educational resources or opencourseware) undermine or enhance “national competitiveness,” specifically in the so-called “knowledge economy”?

Submission Instructions

Submit a tweet-sized abstract (150 characters or less) and a proposal (500 words or less) describing your topic, project, or research by May 15, 2009 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 by June 1, 2009. All presenters are required to register for the conference.

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance decisions will be made based on the following criteria:

A submission is RELEVANT when

• it directly address one or more of the conference themes

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