Guest post by Timothy Vollmer, Creative Commons
Khan Academy has been killing it. The popular video education website now contains over 3,000 educational videos, with topics ranging from basic algebra to 17th century baroque painting. The Khan Academy videos are made available on their website under an open license which allows users to not only view the videos, but also incorporate the video in their websites and remix the videos for their customized educational needs. Khan has delivered almost 130 million of these video lessons to hungry learners online. The Khan Academy videos are Open Educational Resources–OER for short.
Open Educational Resources are free to use and always permit users to engage in the “4Rs”: they can revise, reuse, remix, and redistribute the OER. Online, these automatic permissions are super useful because they save teachers, students, and self learners the time, money, and effort of having to track down the owner and ask their permission to use the learning resource. Open Educational Resources have been around now for over 10 years. You may have heard of some big OER projects such as MIT OpenCourseWare or CK-12 open textbooks. Most Open Educational Resources are licensed under Creative Commons licenses.
The problem with OER is that not that many people know about them. So, Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Institute have teamed up to host the Why Open Education Matters video competition. We want people to create short videos that explains the benefits and promise of Open Educational Resources for teachers, students and schools everywhere. Even U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a champion of OER, and recorded a short video that introduces the contest. The first prize winner will be awarded $25,000, and we’ve lined up some great judges, including Nina Paley, Davis Guggenheim, and James Franco. Please jump in and share your creative video-making skills to explain and promote OER.
Submissions are due by June 5, 2012 on http://whyopenedmatters.org. We’re eating our own dog food too–any video that is submitted must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license so that it can be freely used and shared by anyone to help explain Open Educational Resources. Roll camera!
What an incredible weekend. Nearly 400 people came face-to-face to work on the biggest issues in developing an open media ecosystem.
It’s going to take some time to unpack the Hadron Collider-style interaction and collaboration that took place at #ovc11—so let’s get started!
Each session shared a collaborative space to ease note-taking and future work. Links to all the session notes are listed at: openvideoconference.org/notes
A lot of rich material was created, covering a range of topics. For example, there’s enough to get started on serving your own YouTube style Video CMS, building an open video editing platform, or syncing up video with interactive web elements.
You can read up on advanced video forensics, and the struggle to remain anonymous in a world of overwhelming surveillance. Learn about your rights as a mobile device owner and the limits to free expression online. There are now ways to keep your film alive past its release date, keep it preserved past your lifetime, and compensate your work through new experiments in digital currency. If you’re an educator, there are now advanced ways to use video in the classroom. Also, for good measure, a few strategies for counterbalancing hate speech on the internet.
We’re asking participants to give feedback on our short survey to make next year even more awesome.
As always, email us if you’d like to kick up a project, tweet with hashtag #openvideo, and look forward for updates on next year’s Open Video Conference!
