Open Education 2008: Celebrating Ten Years of Open Content
Fifth Annual Open Education Conference
September 24-26, 2008

Call for Papers

Conference Themes

The open content movement turns ten years old in 2008. Since 1998 we've seen the emergence of incredible collections of open content like Wikipedia, open course materials like MIT OCW, open e-learning like Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative, open record labels like Magnatune, open access journals like the Public Library of Science, and the list goes on. Since 2002 we have referred to open content designed to support learning as "open educational resources."

While many open educational resources projects and other open content projects are incredibly successful, not all of them are sustainable. The first question of the open educational resources movement will always be "are we supporting meaningful learning?" But the second question must be "do we have a sustainable model for continuing to support learning?" At this 10th anniversary conference we will explore these foundational themes of the open educational resources field.

OpenEd 2008 will focus on:

• Supporting meaningful learning
• What does research in learning science, instructional design, informal learning, and other fields tell us about OERs and learner success?
• What design features must OERs incorporate in order to support meaningful learning?
• What is the role of assessment in open environments?
• Should OERs be designed primarily to support reuse "as is" or through adaptation? How do these designs differ?
• Sustaining open educational resources projects
• What OER project sustainability models have proven successful? In what contexts?
• What OER project sustainability models have proven unsuccessful? In what contexts?
• What can OER projects learn from open source business models?
• Are public/private partnerships good for the OER movement?