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OER Policy and Strategy: Position Paper No. 3 - Encore+ Project
Orna Farrell, et al., Encore+ Project, 2023/11/09

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I certainly see the need to challenge "some of the altruistic, philanthropic and public good drivers underlying the OER movement by identifying the need to align new open solutions with the actual problems educators and learners face in today's challenging educational landscape" but I found this paper weak on answers, arguing that "...policy will be the lever by which open practice can become sustainable and mainstream," a position that seems to me essentially empty. I also worry about statements like this: "A fundamental question for future policy development is what is the business model for OER-based implementation strategies? What is the role of the commercial sector? How can educational institutions and business interests work together to better leverage the potential of OER?" This just seems to me to be building failure into the project at the outset.

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"They said what!?"
Erik Angner, The Philosophical Economist, 2023/11/09

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"Things that individual college students say – no matter how outlandish – are almost never newsworthy," writes Erik Angner. "Stories about those students are mostly uninteresting and irrelevant. Serious journalists who write those stories should reconsider their career and life choices." He offers several reasons why this is the case and makes a good argument that we should not get heated up in response. College students are numerous, and diverse, he writes, which means no one student is representative of them. And they are learning, which means they're going to make mistakes.

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Day 1 of the ICDE conference in Costa Rica
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2023/11/09

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Tony Bates is reporting on what he says will be his last conference, the ICDE conference in Costa Rica (he just happened to be in the neighbourhood). Here's Day 1 and Day 2. I note his reference to a presentation from Ron Owston on some work done by Contact North: "two AI tools based on ChatGPT and developed over the last few months by Contact North at very low cost: AI Tutor Pro: a tool to assist student learning; and AI Teaching Assistant Pro: a tool to assist instructors build tests, exams and courses." But the "session that was worth the whole trip" was by Maribell Reyes, Director of Distance Education, and her colleague, Laura Zepeda Orantes, of Tec de Monterrey, Mexico, on how to define which courses or programs to offer in digital modalities

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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