Wikipedia in universities and colleges?
Here at Jisc we are lucky enough to have a view across the education sectors in teaching, learning and research. I’m delighted to be at the EduWiki Conference this week, which is run by the Wikimedia UK Foundation and brings together educators to discuss how they use Wikipedia in their teaching and Wikipedians who create and edit the content. I... >>
Where there's MOOC, there's brass?
Why bother paying inflated fees to attend university? Why pay to spend three years living on a campus, attending seminars and tutorials, running up debts? What if you could get it all for free, online? This is the compelling pitch offered to millions of prospective students from a bewildering array of start-ups and initiatives. Building on the open educational resource... >>
Where the open things are
The issue of making Open Access books discoverable was discussed in nearly all of our focus groups that we held earlier this year as part of the OAPEN -UK project. It’s not just about putting the PDF onto a platform and hoping that readers will find it, it’s about getting metadata out into the web, search and library systems where... >>
Why “open education” matters
The first thing that has struck me about Open Education Week is how genuinely global it is. Scroll through the list of events and webinars and you’ll spot Brazil, Mexico, China, Korea, Africa, Spain, Europe. The big brand US universities might get more press coverage but they are certainly not the only innovators or the only approach. Look to OERu... >>
What is activity data and why is it useful?
Activity data is big business. We see it in the recommendations we get every time we look at something on Amazon, we see its importance every time we get asked if we have a club/nectar/loyalty card when we buy something and we see it in the fascinating story of the Netflix million dollar prize to improve film recommendations for their... >>
Opening up research
As chair of the UK Open Access Implementation Group , I and the group welcome the setting up of an independent working group to examine how UK-funded research findings can be made more accessible. The Group, whose members include Universities UK and the UK Research Councils , sees this as an excellent opportunity to pursue the policy work recommended earlier... >>