8,648 Miles Away but Still Open

Guest blog post by Daniel Williamson of UniqU: The first thing you notice when you arrive in Hanoi, Vietnam is that the people move fast. The flood of motor bikes and scooters zooming through the streets is a testament to the fast-paced, progress oriented culture of Vietnam. The city was chosen to host the fifth annual OpenCourseware Consortium Global meeting for exactly these reason and in specific because of the Vietnamese government's exceptional commitment to open education.

The three day conference, organized around the theme of Educational Policy and OpenCourseware, explored many of the issues concerning building, implementing, and sustaining OpenCourseware Projects. There were many great sessions and workshops but the following are just a few of the highlights.

Open Education Resources for Health Education
An international group of professors and practitioners from around the world have come together to create a network that shares the best health education materials and helps fill the gaps in existing educational content. This is an exciting use of OER as the program not only hopes to create new educational materials but also build a network to facilitate the effective transfer of knowledge. More information about this project can be found at the Health OER website.

Accessibility
The WebAIM company and Tom Caswell provided a quick overview of why accessibility is important to the OER community. For those who might not be familiar with accessibility, accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. There are many reasons why conforming with web accessibility guidelines is a good idea, but besides the obvious benefit of helping individuals with disabilities view your content, you also make your content more visible by search engines improving your search rankings, as well as improving your content's usability in low bandwidth conditions. Perhaps the most convincing reason to make your content accessible is that only accessible content can be adopted for use by public institutions. According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is unlawful for public education institutions including public K-12 schools to use educational materials that do not comply with accessibility standards. This idea was echoed by Hal Plotkin, Senior Adviser to the US Under Secretary of Education and longtime champion of open education. Mr. Plotkin also made the statement that there is quite a bit of funding available from the US government for research and development in the area of accessible content.

If you are interested in finding out more about accessibility and accessibility guidelines, check out the WebAIM website or the Web Accessibility Initiative from the W3C.

Enterprise Rhaptos as an OpenCourseware
The theme of this conference was education policy. The discussions that occurred surrounding this topic were very exciting. The conversation was introduced several times about the need for the easier transfer of knowledge. Frictionless Remix as available through the Connexions system was an incredibly well received idea at the conference and now with Rhaptos, it seemed easier to swallow since anyone can now customize the system to meet their needs. While some customization, for instance changing the license or placing the system behind a firewall, might encumber the transfer of knowledge, simply moving from presentation oriented content, such as PDFs to structured XML, prepares the content for easier sharing in the future.

Conclusion
Perhaps the most interesting part of this conference for me personally was seeing the bigger picture of OpenCourseWare and in particular seeing where Connexions falls in the whole OER ecosystem. Connexions is completely different from typical CourseWare projects, but I believe that people are really beginning to catch on to the ideas of true openness and the necessity for easy remix that Connexions has had from its inception. With Rhaptos now easily available to the general public and with on-going improvements making it easier to use, it is plausible to suggest that more and more CourseWare programs will see Rhaptos as a viable alternative to other existing systems.