Open Educational Resources: Learning Objects for all!

I wrote earlier about my involvement with the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. (There will be several 2008 issues released before the end of the month!)

I am very excited to announce that My Great Friend David Wiley and myself will edit a special issue on Open Educational Resources, to be published in the Summer.

The call for papers follows. The essence: deadline for full papers is 1 March! Please do consider submitting a paper.

Of course, questions, comments, feedback welcome. Assistance in spreading the news is much appreciated!

 

 

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Open Educational Resources: Learning Objects for all!

Introduction

 

The IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies seeks original manuscripts for a Special Issue on Open Educational Resources scheduled to appear in the Summer of 2009.  

Goal

The aim of this special issue is to further our understanding on how the promise of ubiquitous reusable content for learning can be realized with technology that enables open educational resources to be made available, adapted and reused at global scale.

Considerable progress in this area has been achieved under the banner of “Open Educational Resources”, and this special issue aims to establish a reference publication focusing on the technical aspects underpinning the OER movement.

For this issue, open educational resources can can be understood broadly as a further evolution from the notion of learning objects, typically with an open license, for instance from creative commons. The resources can be full courses, but can also be of a much smaller level of granularity like document fragments.

Topics for this special issue include, but are certainly not limited to:

• technical infrastructures for making OER’s available for reuse;
• tools for remixing OER’s;
• standards and specifications for content, search, harvesting, adaptation, etc.
• content models that enable automated disaggregation and recomposition of resource fragments;
• evaluation experiments related to finding, adapting or reusing OER’s;
• automated extraction and generation of metadata that make it easier to find relevant OER’s;
• ranking of OER’s based on relevancy, including contextual clues, time and place, emotion, etc.
• experiences with non-textual content (audio, video, maps, visualizations, …);
• repurposing of recordings of synchronous learning events (lectures, discussions, …);
• versioning, branching and merging of content;
• mash-ups of OER applications;
• social networking and OER’s;interlinking different OER repositories;
• scaffolding learning support around OER’s;
• learning design and OER’s;
• multilingual and multicultural issues in OER’s;
• business models and OER’s;
• localization processes for cultural adaptation of OERs;
• evaluation of OERs;
• combination of social software and OER’s;
• etc.

Important dates

• Submission of abstract: 15 February 2009
• Submission of full paper: 1 March 2009
• Notification deadline: 14th April 2009
• Re-submission of revised papers: 1 June 2009
• Publication: Summer 2009

Papers submitted to this special issue must not have been previously published or be currently submitted for journal publication elsewhere. Submission guidelines are available at http://www.computer.org/portal/pages/transactions/tlt/mc/author.html. 

Submissions for this special issue can be made on Manuscript Central at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tlt-cs, which provides instructions about formatting and length.

If you have any questions, please contact the editors of this special issue:

• Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, Erik.Duval@cs.kuleuven.be
• David Wiley, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA, David.Wiley@byu.edu