Interview with George Siemens about MOOCs

Interview with Dr George Siemens about MOOCS and Open Education – September 2012

The UNESCO OER Agenda

GUIDE ASSOCIATION

Live blogging, 18th March, 9AM

GUIDE workshop Rome – Dr Indrajit Banerjee opening talk – UNESCO

Dr Indrajit Banerjee of the UNESCO ICT in Education, Science and Culture starts by considering some of the challenges and benefits of distance education.

Next, he recommends practitioners the use of  the ICT Competence benchmarks for teachers, launched by UNESCO.

UNESCO is focusing on 3 key areas, having launched its Open Suite Strategy.  It has 3 components: 1) Open  educational resources (Unesco is developing its own educational resources platform); 2) Open Access to Scientific Information and 3) Free and open source software.

He also mentioned UNESCO’s Open Training Platform (OTP) with more than 3500 courses in 21 subject areas. The OTP has over 630 training providers and has attracted more than 1 million visitors (www.opentrainingplatform.org)

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The Discourses of OERs: how flat is this world?

 This paper was presented at the Open Education Conference, Utah State University, September 2007

 The Discourses of OERs: how flat is this world?

Power point slides

Abstract:  This paper discusses the provision of open educational resources, drawing on the concept of a ‘flat world’ (Friedman, 2005). A discourse analytical perspective (Fairclough, 2000) is used to discuss data from example OER initiatives. We enquire how flattening such initiatives are in terms of widening participation and empowering individuals through the access to knowledge.