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

Full papers available on Program page.

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?

Submission Instructions

Submit an abstract (500 characters or less) and a proposal (1-page 8.5" x 11", using the OpenEd Template) describing your topic, project, and/or research related to one or more of the conference themes. In addition OpenEd 2008 will have a track focusing on issues of interest to the OpenCourseWare Consortium, as well as a demonstration session in which presenters can show off their cool applications and sites.

All presenters are required to register for the conference.

Acceptance announcements will be made by July 11, 2008 -- Updated (or two weeks after the submission deadline). If your session was accepted for presentation, we strongly encourage you to submit a full paper for publication in the conference proceedings. Accepted full papers (5-10 pages) are due no later than August 11, 2008.

All submissions (brief description, long description and full papers) and presentations must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance decisions will be made based on the following criteria:

A submission is RELEVANT when

• it directly address one or more of the conference themes

A submission is SIGNIFICANT when

• it raises and discusses issues important to improving the effectiveness and/or sustainability of open education efforts, and
• its contents can be broadly disseminated and understood

A submission is ORIGINAL when

• it addresses a new problem or one that hasn't been studied in depth,
• it has a novel combination of existing research results which promise new insights, and / or
• it provides a perspective on problems different from those explored before

A submission is of HIGH QUALITY when

• existing literature is drawn upon, and / or
• claims are supported by sufficient data, and / or
• an appropriate methodology is selected and properly implemented, and / or
• limitations are described honestly

A submission is CLEARLY WRITTEN when

• it is organized effectively, and / or
• the English is clear and unambiguous, and / or
• it follows standard conventions of punctuation, mechanics, and citation, and / or
• the readability is good

Questions?

Email opened2008 [at] cosl [dot] usu [dot] edu.