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Category: OpenStax

To do: upcoming events

CC-By: Office Now

CC-By: Office Now

Spring 2015 is positively lousy with EdTech-related events, meetings, webinars, and more events. And webinars. There are also meetings: lots of ‘em. Below are the ones I have compiled, at least through April, the cruelest month. For a complete list, go to http://edtech.vccs.edu/upcoming-events/.

If you have an event that you would like to add, please let me know.

February 06, 2015 (Happening now!)
JSRCC FantasTech Virtual Conference
Online

February 09, 2015
Educause Learning Initiative (ELI)
Anaheim, CA

February 11, 2015
Increasing College Access and Success through Zero-Textbook-Cost Degrees
Washington, DC

February 17, 2015
New America Foundation: Community College Online
Washington, DC & online

February 19, 2015
ELET Committee Meeting
Charlottesville, VA

February 19, 2015
VCCS Peer Group Meeting | Accounting/Business/Economics
Richmond, VA

February 24, 2015
Tech Council
Suffolk, VA

March 04, 2015
CODD/ASAC
Fredericksburg, VA

March 08, 2015
Innovations Conference
Boston, MA

March 09, 2015
SXSW Edu
Austin, TX

March 30, 2015
OpenSym 2015 | Call for Papers

March 30, 2015
OxCon: OpenStax Conference
Houston, TX

April 01, 2015
New Horizons 2015
Roanoke, VA

April 09, 2015
Council for the Study of Community Colleges Conference (CSCC)
Ft. Worth, TX

April 17, 2015
VWCC 2015 Instructional Technology Mini-Conference
Roanoke, VA

April 22, 2015
OpenEd Global Conference
Banff, Alberta, CANADA

April 22, 2015
OLC | Emerging Technologies for Online Learning
Dallas, TX

The Digital Revolution Will Be Livestreamed

The Textbook Costs and Digital Learning Resources (TCDLR) Committee released this final report a few weeks ago at the last meeting of the Reengineering Task Force. I co-chaired the committee with the wonderful Dr. Mark Estepp, President of Southwest Virginia Community College. The committee was charged with the following tasks:

  1. examine VCCS administrative practices and policies that unnecessarily add to the cost of academic textbooks,
  2. explore how networked digital technology can best be leveraged to lower the overall cost of textbooks, including using open educational resources,
  3. investigate ways which currently licensed electronic resources can be used in electronic “course packs,” as a substitute for textbooks, or for the supplementary material often required for a course of study,
  4. identify opportunities for interested VCCS faculty to explore using openly licensed resources in their courses,
  5. examine the current relevance of printed textbooks in an age of interactive, web-based content, digital publishing, and
  6. recommend strategies and policies for creating an institutional culture that embraces and practices openness, transparency, collaboration, and sharing.

The report contains a number of recommendations for lowering the cost of course materials across the VCCS. I am really proud of what this group accomplished, much of it before the release of this report, including the 17 college VCCS Collaborative Bookstore contract with Follett to textbook reduction metrics in the annual evaluations of VCCS presidents. In fact, in many ways the final report is a bit anti-climactic.

Still, you should red it. You can read or download a copy of the report below:

Get your hammers. We’re building an OpenVA

It is encouraging that last year’s OpenVA conference wasn’t a one-off event. It easily could have been. The conference was initiated and supported by the McDonnell administration, now gone, and could easily have ended with a round of pat on the backs and atta boys after the conference’s closing session, held at the Stafford campus of the University of Mary Washington. But OpenVA has come back for a second year, kept alive by the passion and dedication of the conference organizers, an enthusiastic group of educators representing Virginia’s public post-secondary institutions.

TCC_VA_Beach

TCC’s cool-looking student center, Virginia Beach campus

The  follow-up event is scheduled for Saturday, October 18th at Tidewater Community College’s Virginia Beach campus. The event will be a little different this year, focused less on sharing best practices and more on the development of a framework of policies that support greater adoption of open resources and promote collaboration among institutions across the state. The summit, called Building OpenVA, will gather input from participants during four focused discussion sessions with the purpose of developing recommendations for a statewide open resource strategy.

The summit is for administrators, educators, legislators, librarians, and learning technologists involved with public post-secondary education in Virginia who:

  • have launched successful open initiatives that they would like to expand or scale,
  • know, or want to know, how to support an open initiative at their institution,
  • understand the importance of openness and want to better understand how ‘open’ is currently being deployed throughout Virginia,
  • believe in the promise of ‘open’ but aren’t sure how to start or sustain an open initiative,
  • want to learn how to form and write policy for open education.

You can find out more about the Building OpenVA Summit, as well as respond to an open call for submissions, at the event website: http://openva.org/. And don’t forget that the 2014 Open Ed Conference will take place a few weeks later in Washington, DC, another great opportunity for VCCS faculty and staff interested in learning more about OER and global open initiatives.

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