User:Dmalicke/sandbox

Open.Michigan is a University of Michigan (U-M) initiative that helps U-M faculty, students, and staff find, use, and create openly licensed educational materials. Open.Michigan manages an online repository that hosts OpenCourseWare (OCW), open educational resources (OER), and other open content of created by University of Michigan and partner institutions. The online repository also includes references and links to other freely and publicly available U-M teaching and learning experiences, such as courses available on Coursera and iTunes U, which is not necessarily openly licensed. Guided by the principles of open notebook science, the primary coordinators of the Open.Michigan also share their training materials, operational processes, research studies, and custom application software.

History
Open.Michigan started as a result of a collaboration between faculty, administrators, and students. From fall 2005 to fall 2007, U-M School of Information (UMSI) faculty members and graduate students developed the dScribe process for creating OER and the web-based application used to support the dScribe process, OERca. In fall 2007, the University of Michigan Medical School hired the UMSI graduate students to pilot the dScribe process in an effort to publish some medical school materials as OER.

In Spring 2008, the Medical School committed to publishing all pre-clinical curriculum materials as OER. That same year, a planning grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation was awarded to support collaborative production and sharing of OER between U-M health science schools and partner institutions in Africa. The collaboration between U-M health science schools and partner institutions in Africa is named the African Health OER Network and is partly supported by the Open.Michigan team. From 2008 to 2010 Open.Michigan utilized the dScribe process and worked with U-M student dScribes to produce OER/OCW from various schools and colleges on campus.

Coordination of the Open.Michigan initiative has been funded though a variety of internal and external funding sources, including the U-M Medical School, U-M Office of the Provost, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

dScribe
To facilitate the creation of OER, Open.Michigan developed a process called dScribe. This process uses students, acting as dScribes, and faculty working together to gather, review, and publish learning materials. The dScribe model uses a suite of software tools to manage the process of gathering, vetting, and publishing course material. The process begins with CTools, the University of Michigan's implementation of the Sakai CLE (Collaboration and Learning Environment). dScribes export the course materials from CTools, and then upload those materials to OERca which automatically scans the materials for any content objects (images). OERca also serves as a processing tool for managing content copyright status and tracking student-faculty interactions. The content is then deposited into Open.Michigan's instance of eduCommons, an open source OER publishing platform.

U-M Medical School OER
In Spring 2008, the Medical School committed to publishing all pre-clinical curriculum materials as OER.

The African Health OER Network
In 2008, the U-M Medical School and U-M Dental School began a collaborative open educational resources program with African health science institutions, which later became known as the African Health OER Network. The goal of the African Health OER Network to advance health education in Africa by creating and promoting free, openly licensed teaching materials created by Africans to share knowledge, address curriculum gaps, and support health education communities. Co-founders of the Network include the South African Institute for Distance Education, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, University of Ghana, University of Cape Town, and University of the Western Cape. Focused initially on health sciences education in Ghana and South Africa, the Network has since expanded to include to additional institutions in other countries.

To date, the program has been supported primarily by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation with supplemental funding from the Open Society Foundations in 2008 and from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2008-2010.

The OER created as part of this program are hosted locally by the authoring institutions as well as through the OER Africa and Open.Michigan websites.

Collection
Open.Michigan’s collection, which can be accessed via the Open.Michigan website, showcases teaching and learning resources and experiences from U-M faculty, students, staff, and partner institutions. The collection contains hosted and referenced educational content from 16 U-M schools and colleges, including content from U-M Flint, U-M libraries, and from student organizations and projects. All of the educational materials that are hosted by Open.Michigan and that can be downloaded from the Open.Michigan website are open educational resources. The collection also contains references and links to freely available educational resources and experiences that can be found on various publicly accessible websites, such as Coursera, iTunes U, CARMA, YouTube, and SlideShare.

OpenCourseWare
Currently, 12 U-M Schools and Colleges have published OpenCourseWare (OCW) on Open.Michigan. The U-M schools and colleges that have published OCW are the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, the Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, the School of Dentistry, the School of Education, the College of Engineering, the School of Information, the Medical School, the School of Nursing, the College of Pharmacy, the School of Public Health, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and U-M Flint. Many of the open educational resources that make up the OCW on Open.Michigan were created via the dScribe process. The School of Information and the Medical School have the largest collections of OER/OCW available on Open.Michigan.

Open Educational Resources
A major component of Open.Michigan is the creation and publication of Open Educational Resources (OER). The OpenCourseWare available on the site is made up of individual OER, which can be reused, remixed, and redistributed independently of the courses they are associated with. Several U-M schools and colleges have published OER that are not associated with a complete open course or OCW within the collection. Other types of OER included in the Open.Michigan collection are open modules, learning objects, textbooks, streaming videos, software, student notes, and a variety of materials and techniques that can be used to support access to knowledge and the creation of OER. Some OER from the collection is also redistributed on various websites such as YouTube, SlideShare, Internet Archive, iTunes U, and Flickr.

All Rights Reserved Educational Resources
Open.Michigan's collection also contains links to U-M produced educational resources and experiences that are available to learners free of charge, but that are not released under an open license, such as a Creative Commons license. Authors of this content have not waived any of their copyrights for their materials, and have published them on the internet with all rights reserved. The U-M courses that are available on Coursera and many of the U-M courses available on iTunes U fall into this category. Materials from these courses can only be accessed, they cannot be remixed, reused, and redistributed like the OCW/OER materials.

Software Application Development
List of software applications that members of the Open.Michigan team have developed and released to support the creation and use of open content and open teaching and learning practices.

Learning Registry Module
The Learning Registry Module is a Drupal 6.x module built for publishing data to a Learning Registry node.

OERbit
OERbit is a Drupal-based publishing platform designed to share openly licensed learning resources (OER/OCW) with the world. The Open.Michigan team, together with the Ann Arbor, MI, based CMS development company named Switchback, created and deployed OERbit as the publishing platform for the Open.Michigan website. OERbit provides a basic set of functionality for OER/OCW publishers, including course and resource-based navigation, flexible content hierarchies, Creative Commons license integration, RSS distribution, and RDFa output. The code is open source, released under the GPLv2 license, and is available for download and distribution on GitHub.

OERca
OERca is a web-based content review application designed for people in the process of creating open content. OERca can be used to organize materials, to track content changes within resources, to manage rights and license information, and to collaborate with others with whom someone is working with to create OER and to clear content of copyright concerns. OERca is Open Source Software, released under the Apache License V2.0, and is available for download on SourceForge.

Open Badges Module
The Open Badges Module is a Drupal 6.x module based on the User Badges module. The Open Badges module allows each user on OERbit to be assigned badges, displayed as a series of iconic images. The Open Badges Module can also be used to manage badges for Mozilla's Open Badges infrastructure.

Open Case Builder
Open Case Builder is a downloadable web application that can be used to create instructional modules such as patient cases, quizzes, and readings. The author completes simple forms to insert text, media, and questions and uses arrows to arrange them in the desired order. No Internet connection, knowledge of HTML or web design is required. Open Case Builder is available for download on GitHub.