OER Policy Development Tool
Daniel DeMarte, Amanda Coolidge, Lumen Learning, 2016/08/31

This tool will help institutions and organizations develop the open access policies they wish to support. It's a bit text-heavy (for example, a one or two work selector should be used for a check-box option, not an entire paragraph) but it should serve as a useful guide. The aim of the tool is to promote system-wide openness. "We believe that to realize the full potential of OER, colleges and universities must move beyond pockets of innovation, where OER is utilized only for select courses, and scale efforts to full OER programs."

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B.C. Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit
Tara Robertson, Sue Doner, Amanda Coolidge, BC Campus, 2016/08/31

Needless to say this is an important resources that will be appreciated by a wide public. "The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit is to provide the resources needed so that each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, teaching assistant, etc. has the opportunity to create a truly open and accessible textbook. An open textbook that is free and accessible for all students."

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“The fun they had” or about the quality of MOOC
Patrizia Ghislandi, Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, 2016/08/31

I remember the Isaac Asimov story referenced in this article (16 page PDF). I credit my extensive reading of science fiction with a lot of the foresight I've been able to bring to our field, including with respect to MOOCs. Not surprisingly, this paper concludes, "the relevant literature about MOOC’s evaluation is still uncertain between the need to adopt one of the few quality enhancement frameworks specifically created for MOOC or reuse the e-learning quality models available online." As I mentioned the other day, ultimately we'll have to evaluate online learning in terms of impact with respect to provider and participant objectives.

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