The area of learning has a justifiable claim to be a special case in how it can be enhanced or supported by technology. In areas such as commerce and web design the aim is usually to ensure efficiency and support specific actions such as purchasing or accessing information as quickly and easily as possible. Working with technology for the purpose…

Higher education institutions are recognising the clear benefits of open educational resources, and academics are engaging with the development of these resources. This paper presents a case study of OERs being developed using the live, current BloodhoundSSC world land speed record project as a basis. The paper outlines the rationale for the…

Despite increased development and dissemination, there has been very little empirical research on Open Educational Resources (OER). Teachers and students involved in a large-scale OER initiative at eight community colleges across the United States were given a detailed questionnaire aimed at uncovering their perceptions of the cost, outcomes, uses…

It's like a dream come true for educators: free resources available wherever a web browser can operate and with nary an iota of advertising. What's not to like? What is it about this organization, whose mission is "to provide a free, world-class education for anyone anywhere," that has provoked such vitriol? Part of it is that when its videos have…

Open education resources (OER) may be defined as any digital materials designed for use in teaching and learning that are openly available for use by educators and students, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or license fees. Hitherto, research on students' use of OER has been mainly limited to those in Western countries, mainly in the…

Social software environments are increasingly used for open education: teachers and learners share and collaborate in these environments. While there are various possibilities for the inclusion of such social functionalities for OER, many organizational, individual and technological challenges can hinder the motivation of teachers to share and…

Higher education in Tanzania like in many other Sub-Saharan countries suffers from unavailability of quality teaching and learning resources due to lack of tradition, competence, and experience to develop such resources. Nevertheless, there are thousands of open educational resources (OER) freely available in the public domain that can potentially…

This paper presents a case study analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of using project-based learning (PBL) combined with collaborative learning (CL) and industry best practices, integrated with information communication technologies, open-source software, and open-source hardware tools, in a specialized microcontroller and embedded systems…

The Impact of Open Licensing on the Early Reader Ecosystem examines how to use open licensing to promote quality learning resources for young children that are relevant and interesting. Research in early reading tends to focus on traditional publishing value and supply chains, without taking much consideration of new approaches and solutions…

OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Open Educational Resources (OER) are two new and closely related educational technologies. Both provide open access to learning materials for students and instructors via the Internet. These are for the moment still very young technologies. While they have grown dramatically in just ten years there is still relatively…

This paper introduces a test sign-up application developed for a math department at a university. The requirements, design, and final software product are presented, along with one very important unexpected problem that arose after completion of the work--the system to be implemented and maintained by the client was not compatible with the…

In the high tech factories of today robots can be used to perform various tasks that span a wide spectrum that encompasses the act of performing high-speed, automated assembly of cell phones, laptops and other electronic devices to the compounding, filling, packaging and distribution of life-saving pharmaceuticals. As robot usage continues to…

OpenMx is free, full-featured, open source, structural equation modeling (SEM) software. OpenMx runs within the "R" statistical programming environment on Windows, Mac OS-X, and Linux computers. The rationale for developing OpenMx is discussed along with the philosophy behind the user interface. The OpenMx data structures are…

This essay discusses SciELO, a scientific journal database operating in 14 countries. It covers over 1000 journals providing open access to full text and table sets of scientometrics data. In Brazil it is responsible for a collection of nearly 300 journals, selected along 15 years as the best Brazilian periodicals in natural and social sciences.…

This is a critical phase for Open Educational Resources (OER) movement: on one side the number of OER is increasing rapidly, and on other side debates about quality of OER-based courseware are heating up. These debates emanate from the fact that OER-based courseware are supposed to help users to follow a logical learning path and get an engaging,…