Nebraska State College System Hosts Open Education Summit

Nearly 130 faculty and staff from Chadron, Peru and Wayne State Colleges came together with internationally known experts in the field of Open Educational Resources. Those unable to travel to Wayne for the summit were able to participate virtually from designated sites at Peru State and Chadron State Colleges.

Open education and open educational resources focus on providing courses and course material without cost to users, who are able to reuse, revise and remix those materials. Chadron State is a partner in the Kaleidoscope Project which promotes, at a minimum, designing and updating general studies courses that utilize OER.

Participants at the OER Summit engaged in discussions, course demonstration projects and plenary sessions on the history of open education, challenges facing providers and users and possibilities for the future. The group examined free and low cost materials available through projects such as the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware, the Washington State Open Course Library and the Creative Commons copyright.

Internationally recognized speakers for the OER Summit included Dr. Vijay Kumar, director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cable Green, director of Global Learning for the Creative Commons, Dr. David Wiley; director of the Open Education Group at the Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling at Brigham Young University; Kim Thanos, program manager for the Kaleidoscope Project and CEO of Lumen Learning; and Dr. Norman Bier, associate director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.