OA Educational Resources


From TeadchTech Topia at http://mastersinspecialeducation.net/2010/top-50-open-access-open-source-education-projects/

Top 50 Open Access & Open Source Education Projects

Posted by Jennifer on November 8, 2010

Education is all about learning through innovative solutions, and Open Access (OA) and Open Source (OS) projects drive the goal to bring educational materials to the public through technology. While we have listed some finalized resources in this compilation of the top 50 OA|OS education projects, the focus is on methodologies within OA|OS initiatives.


College- and University-Based Initiatives

  1. eCommons @ Cornell: This project is a service of the Cornell University Library that provides long-term access to a broad range of Cornell-related digital content of enduring value.
  2. Highwire: This is Stanford University’s OA project, which they bill as “the largest archive of free full-text science on Earth.” Researchers also can use tools, such as citation alerts.
  3. Open Access Books: The Hilton C. Buley Library at Southern Connecticut State University offers open access resources for the public and for students.
  4. Open Access Resources at Seattle Community Colleges: This Wiki is an open resource for faculty at Seattle Community Colleges to learn more about Open Access tools and content.
  5. Public Knowledge Project: This project is a college and library cooperative dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research.
  6. Spectrum Research Repository: In 2010, Concordia University’s academic community passed a landmark Senate Resolution on Open Access that encouraged freely accessible research.
  7. The Ohio State University Press Open Access Initiative: Complete texts of certain peer-reviewed books are available from this Web site.
  8. The Orange Grove: University Press of Florida has partnered with The Orange Grove, an initiative and a digital repository that fosters an environment to share, disseminate, and collaborate in the development of educational resources.
  9. University of Florida’s Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project: CAP’s goal is to allow citizens and public officials to better understand public access to local government information in all 50 states.
  10. University of Toronto Project Open Source | Open Access: This networked community of scholars, students and members of the broader community is interested in the phenomenon of open source and open access.
  11. uO Research: The University of Ottawa’s institutional repository includes theses, articles, working papers, technical reports, conference papers, data sets in various digital formats.


Tools

  1. Creative Commons: This nonprofit organization works at increasing sharing and improving collaboration.
  2. Digital Preservation: This Library of Congress initiative is designed for national digital information infrastructure and preservation.
  3. DSpace: This open source software enables open sharing of content that “spans organizations, continents and time.”
  4. LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe): This tool, based at Stanford University Libraries, provides libraries with digital preservation tools and support.
  5. Media Access Project: MAP is a non-profit, public interest law firm and advocacy organization working in communications policy.
  6. Oasis: Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook provides help for institutions and groups that want to create open access projects.
  7. Portico: This digital preservation service, a non-profit organization originally launched by JSTOR in 2002, is among the largest community-supported digital archives in the world.
  8. Public Knowledge: Public Knowledge is a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group working to defend citizens’ rights in the emerging digital culture.
  9. Xena: This “XML Electronic Normalising for Archives” open-source software for digital preservation is written and maintained by the digital preservation team at the National Archives of Australia.


Organizations and Initiatives

  1. CONSER Open Access Journal Project: This Library of Congress project targets the Directory of DOAJ (see below) to assure that CONSER records are available for all journals in the collection.
  2. FedoraCommons: FedoraCommons refers to Fedora Repository Project, an architecture for storing, managing, and accessing digital content.
  3. Online Computer Library Center: OCLC has become the world’s largest library cooperative for libraries, archives and museums.
  4. Open Archives Initiative: This project develops and promotes interoperability stands that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.
  5. Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: The OAI-PMH is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability.
  6. Open Content Alliance: OCA is a collaborative global effort to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material.
  7. Open Courseware Consortium: This project is a collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.
  8. Open Source Initiative: OSI is a non-profit corporation formed to educate and advocate for the benefits of open source.
  9. Openlaw: Derived from the open code model, this project is an experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum on-line.
  10. Public Library of Science: PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
  11. Science Commons: Science Commons works in a number of broad areas to clear the legal and technical barriers to research scholarly copyright, biological materials transfer, data integration and patent licenses.


European Initiatives

  1. Budapest Open Access Initiative: This project invites the signatures, support, and participation of the entire world scientific and scholarly community.
  2. Digital Preservation Coalition: This project was launched in 2001 to foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK.
  3. Open Access in the Helmholtz Association: Since 2005, the Helmholtz Open Access Project has supported scientists as well as respective Helmholtz Centres in the realization of Open Access.
  4. Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable open access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
  5. OpenAIRE: Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe is a three-year project funded under FP7 (Seventh Framework Programme) has taken up its work to implement OA on a pan-European scale.
  6. Openarchives.eu: This project is the European guide to OAI-PMH (Open Archives Inistiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) compliant digital repositories worldwide.
  7. OpenDOAR: This project is primarily a service to enhance and support the academic and research activities of the global community, sponsored by the University of Nottingham, UK.
  8. Planets: This four-year project is co-funded by the European Union under the IS&T FP6 Programme to address core digital preservation challenges.
  9. Study of Open Access Publishing: SOAP is a two-year project founded in 2009 and funded by the European Commission under FP7.
  10. The European Library: This project offers a free service that provides access to the resources within 48 national libraries of Europe in 35 languages.


Open Access Repositories

  1. ARKive: ARKive is creating the ultimate multimedia guide to the world’s endangered species.
  2. Directory of Open Access Journals: DOAJ covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in all subjects and languages.
  3. NEON: The National Ecological Observatory Network will collect data across the United States on the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on natural resources and biodiversity.
  4. Open Access Textbooks: This is a two-year initiative to create a sustainable model for the discovery, production, and dissemination of open textbooks.
  5. Project Gutenberg: Download over 33,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, iPad, Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android or other mobile or cell phone.
  6. The Internet Archive Text Archive: This repository contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children’s books, historical texts and academic books.
  7. The Universal Digital Library: The Million Book Digital Library Project created this tool to find free-to-read books, primarily in the English language.
  8. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive: A repository for digital and Internet art, performance, installation, conceptual, and other variable media art.
  9. Yashar Books Open Access: Open Access Project is an experimental, cutting-edge plan for developing Torah scholarship.

Tagged as: OA, open access, open access journal, open access repository, open access textbooks, open source, opencourseware, OS

 

 

 

Prof Derek Keats of Wits on re-using presentations for education uses.

http://presentations.wits.ac.za/index.php?module=webpresent&action=view&id=gen13Srv42Nme14_4790_1246723859

 

He referes  to AVOIR, which accoring to the website at http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/ is

The African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) builds capacity in software engineering in Africa using Free Software (Open Source) as the vehicle. A partnership of 16 African Universities in an alliance that includes partners in North America, Europe, and Kabul, Afghanistan, AVOIR is a network with a node in each member institution. Each node participates in the development, deployment and support of software, seeks business and partnership opportunities that lead to sustainability, implements software in support of their institutional requirements, participates actively in communication and collaboration activities, and helps to market the network, and its products and services. AVOIR has created the Chisimba framework and applications based on it, and will be offering a masters in Free and Open Source Software starting in early 2009. 21 August 2008