Language Resource Center 2012 Open.Michigan introduction

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thanks for having me here today, I’m Emily Puckett Rodgers, the Open Education Coordinator for the Open.Michigan initiative. Julie asked me here to chat with you about our initiative and what we do. I think the Open.Michigan initiative and the Language Resource Center share a lot of common goals and motivations for supporting the teaching and learning needs of our campus.
• #3: We found a home for Open.Michigan in the Medical School, with support from Dean Woolliscroft.  With this support, Open.Michigan is charged with gathering and editing the first two years of medical education at U-M and publishing these online as Open Educational Resources. Open.Michigan is still housed in the Medical School but we serve the entire University of Michigan community and campuses.  We are two full-time staff "strong" with an additional program manager for our international health OER project and a handful of folks who dedicate some percentage of their appointment to Open.Michigan projects. Open.Michigan serves both as a model for other open education initiatives by developing and documenting support material as well as an initiative which supports open publication of U-M scholarly content.
• #5: Our office also supports the African Health OER Network. Built up of 17 institutions and organizations across the United States and Africa, this organization fosters open educational practices by co-creating and sharing educational content across institutions. By adding Creative Commons licenses to this work, these institutions are able to create effective, high quality educational programs and modules that can be shared and adapted to suit local needs. African-created resources are also being used at U-M to teach students here about surgical techniques and global health needs.
• #6: At U-M since we give control of copyright decisions back to faculty and departmental heads of units, these units and faculty members can choose how they want to share their work with their students and with learners or other teachers worldwide.  This means that the scholarly work that you produce at the LRC (including your videos, teacher resources, newsletters, photographs, websites and blogs) can be licensed to share to meet your specific pedagogical or service-oriented goals. MPublishing and SPG on Copyright
• #7: Languages and translation offer a really great opportunity to share our work at U-M with the global learning community. In the past two year’s we’ve had the pleasure of working with Dr. Margaret Noori and your department (Phil) to publish the Anishinaabe collection of stories on our website and in Deep Blue and we’ve worked with Tatiana Calixto to help her publish podcasts and great interactive modules for Spanish learners that can be accessed by any one.
• #9: We have two major goals at Open.Michigan: 1) To support a thriving culture of sharing at U-MIn order to support a culture of sharing, we have several objectives we aim to achieve.We base our actions on participation and ground-up interest, so we have a lot of 1:1 contact with members of our community and I go to lots and lots of meetings with folks across campus. We act as a portal to the types of content produced by U-M that can be shared with and used by the global learning community.
• #10: While we do publish a lot of content and house a collection of resources available to anyone, the power of our initiative lies in our community. Recently, we started partnering muchmore with current projects, interests and activities on campus.  Instead of starting from "Open" we're starting with other people's passions, research interests and needs and blending "openness" into our support of these activities.  This has been really successful and we've seen an increase in the amount of people participating in our events and in the outcomes of the events.  You see a few examples on this slide of projects we're consulting on (MERLOT, Global Health Disparities, Emergency Health), committees we're a part of (eTextbooks, Digital Storytelling), and local conferences or events we've coordinated or presented at.
• #11: We try to make it easy for people to share by giving them tools and guidance for their own creation and publication of open content.  We've developed an open publishing platform based on Drupal called OERbit.  We've developed a participatory, volunteer driven process for collecting, assessing and re-publishing educational resources under open licenses called dScribe and we've developed a content and decision management tool to support the dScribe process called OERca. We try to make it easy to support open educational practices by providing lots of DIY resources and this is where our strong branding comes in handy. We do a lot of training and consulting on campus as well, so for example I spent yesterday afternoon with the marketing teams at the International Institute, where I introduced them to Creative Commons licenses and how to use licensed content in their media. We have trained the student workers at the Digital Media Commons and the PASSes in the residence halls on how to create and use open content.
• #12: We also encourage other departments and units across campus to actively use licenses for their own work. Because U-M and other institutions are starting to share so much of their content online, they are starting to make more thoughtful decisions about how this content can be used by other institutions, other learners or teachers.  Instead of setting people up for copyright infringement if they copy/paste a quote from an article from U-M or use a photograph of our Medical campus, departments across the university are starting to apply Creative Commons licenses to their websites and the content produced by their departments.  Here are three examples…  This can actually be very useful across campus as well as outside of campus because it allows your department to tell other departments how they might be able to use your work.
• #13: Fora grassroots initiative, we’ve seen an increase in the demand for our services, including consultation, training and publications support. We’ve had 40 requests for training at U-M or in the area in the past 2.5 yearsAnd we continue to publish DIY resources developed including what open licenses are, how to use them, guidelines for activities like video productionOpen.Michigan tries to capture the content that gets created in the classroom as well as in formal settings.  We're now seeing the fall of the instructor and the rise of the mentor.  Lines are blurring between what counts as scholarship and what counts as education (homework assignments, badges, mentorship). Faculty can focus on teaching/connecting with their students rather than on developing content. Flipped classroom Student are becoming content creators and breaking down distinctions between expert-lead scholarship and academic learning. It’s a very exciting time to be in education right now, with these emergent opportunities to focus our efforts on engaging students and brining them into the education landscape as collaborators that support intellectual exchange of ideas and contribute to new forms of scholarship.
• #14: Americas, 7,137 (6,405 from N. America, 603)Asia 2,290 (Southern Asia 972, Eastern Asia 472)Europe 2,155 (W 450, E 350)Africa 487Oceana 249
• #15: The collection of materials in the Language Resources Gateway is like a MERLOT for language resources, it’s Open Access. With an additional field indicating licensing, you can make these resources even more useful to users. Open.Michigan can also help promote LRC’s content by building a landing page to it from our site or cross listing it in our collections. By licensing this material, you can improve other people’s ability to translate the work and make it more useful across different educational settings while still maintaining the U-M brand. We can also help with basic copyright training and aligning the work that is produced at the LRC with open educational standards.
• #16:  Thanks for listening, I'm happy to answer any questions y'all might have. Feel free to get in touch with me or the Open.Michigan team through any of these channels.