Digital Inclusion: Content, Community and Technology

In the 1990s, as the digital age began to bloom, educators were among the first to embrace the internet and first generation Web 1.0 technologies, finding creative and innovative ways to integrate the internet into their classrooms. Along with the promise of e-learning came many challenges, including the issue of what is commonly known as the “digital divide.”

While the digital divide is being addressed by the global community through such projects as OLPC and other programmes, there are still many schools around the world stuck in the divide without access to computers and/or the internet. This is effectively shutting them out of the opportunity to connect with the rest of the world, engage and participate as a digital citizen and lifelong student.

Following the lead from the open source software and Web 2.0 movement, members of the education community are embracing the user-generated content model and applying it to many different aspects of the education ecosystem.

The open learning approach has resulted in an explosion of a new and burgeoning library of Open Educational Resources (OER), open source Course Management Systems (CMS), and open learning mashups that have allowed educators to easily take community-generated content and remix, adapt, and reuse them to support teaching and learning in a variety of contexts.

Despite enormous strides towards digital inclusion, technology is only part of the solution. Another vital component of the digital divide that gets less attention, but is nearly as important is lack of quality, free, and open content on the web.The key aim of the open learning movement is to have quality educational content available for students once they cross the digital divide.

The solution to the digital divide is threefold - open source technology (access to computers, CMS, and internet access), OER community (a global community of practice,pedagogical approaches and peer support), and availability of open content (OER, OpenCourseWare, user-generated content) repositories of educational materials.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open educational resources (OER) have received attention for their ability to serve as an equitable and accessible alternative to the rising costs and increased commercialization and privatization of education. For educators and students, the proliferation of OER collections and repositories has meant centralised access to materials and the possibility of collaborating and sharing with others.

Educational scholars and members of new OER communities have suggested several new models—ranging from “educational mashup” sites, which though common understanding and interfacing allow content to flow from place to place so that users can easily pull and integrate content across multiple collections, to “micro-sites” that serve as a single point of entry across multiple collections and allow educators and learners to impact educational resources with their own vocabulary, content, and metadata experience.

OPEN EDUCATION RESOURCES (OER)
ORGNISATION	RESOURCES
BBC Open Archive	Archive of multimedia and other content from several leading institutions across the U.K., most notably the BBC and BFI.
COSL	Community of practice built around open source education.
OER Commons	Teaching and learning network, from K-12 lesson plans.
Teachers TV	Open video content for educators across the U.K. Includes footage for classroom use as well as on demand professional development courses.
Kitzu	Create multi-media content for your classroom.
Bookyards	Thousands of online books, video, eBooks, links and access to online libraries.
Google Books	Google has digitised many books from library collections, including hundreds of books related to Old English literature: editions, & translations.
International Digital	Features children's books from around the world, Children’s Library selected by kids and adults.
The Oz Project	This Australian site celebrates online curriculum projects and the world of unique learning opportunities.
Smithsonian.TV	Live and archived events and multimedia at the Smithsonian Institution.
Harvard Open Collections Programme	A web-based collection of approximately 1,800 books & pamphlets, 6,000 photographs, 200 maps, & 13,000 pages from manuscript & archival collections from Harvard's library, archives & museums.
iTunesU	Thousands of audio and video files from top universities around the world.
Wikiversity	Create and share open content multimedia.
Wikibooks	Open content textbooks.
Connextions	Founded by Rice University, this site is a place to share and create open educational resources (OER).
Librivox	Digital library of free public domain audio books that are read and recorded by volunteers.
Open Source Teaching Project	The Open Source Teaching Project is a volunteer collaborative focused on creating meaningful educational bridges among traditionally disconnected networks.

Creative Commons & ccLearn

Creative Commons, an orgnisation that provides alternative copyright tools for use on web-based materials, recently announced the creation of a new initiative specifically designed for use with OERs. The ccLearn initiative is designed to protect the intellectual copyright of educators, authors and publishers while providing content creators with more freedom to distribute educational content with peers, OER repositories and communities and OpenCourseWare (OCW) platforms. ccLearn is dedicated to supporting the development of open education and OER on the internet. Building on the power of Creative Commons, and the generosity and support of the educational community, ccLearn aims to be a leader in helping the world bridge the content gap.

CREATIVE COMMONS
ORGNISATION	RESOURCES
Creative Commons	Creative Commons provides licensing tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators mark their work with the remix/reuse freedoms they want it to carry.
Flickr + Creative Commons	View and use thousands of images by Creative Commons license.
Yahoo! Search + Creative Commons	The Yahoo!+Creative Commons Search can be used to find open content & copyright free materials for lesson plans or handouts. This is also a powerful search tool for students looking for open content resources they can use in projects, research, or reports.

OpenCourseWare

The OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement has helped some of the world’s best universities offer teaching, learning and research resources by publishing their faculty’s course materials online and making them available free of charge. Despite the fact that most OCW projects are not technology projects, all of the OCW rely on web-based technologies to facilitate the open sharing of knowledge.

Educators are embracing new types of social media to take OCW to the next level and build a community around their virtual classroom.In addition, a large amount of OCW is being updated to include new multimedia capabilities and enhanced functionality. The purpose is to replicate class and lab experiences interactively online using visual technologies.

MIT’s recent evaluation report of its OCW collection revealed that educators were accessing OERs to support their course planning and preparation and to enhance their personal knowledge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006). According to the MIT report, 96 percent of these educators indicated that MIT’s open courseware (OCW) collection has or will help to improve their courses. Students and self-learners, representing the largest number of OCW users, accessed the collection for various reasons, including planning future studies, complementing their existing courses, or improving their personal knowledge.

Utah State University is another one of several universities providing free and open content course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world through the OCW initiative as well as connecting educators, OCW content providers and learning communities with each other through the Center for Open Sustanable Learning (COSL) think tank and annual conference.

OPENCOURSEWARE (OCW)
ORGNISATION	RESOURCES
Utah State University OCW	Provides courses from across all disciplines at Utah State University curriculum.
China Open Resources For Education (CORE)	CORE is committed to providing Chinese universities with free and easy access to global open educational resources.
Budapest Open Access Initiative	Spearheading the development of EU Open Course Ware in the EU.
Open Content Alliance (OCA)	The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental orgnisations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitised text and multimedia content.
MIT OCW	Contains 1700 courses from across the MIT curriculum.

 

OPEN SOURCE COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (CMS)
ORGNISATION	RESOURCES
Moodle	Open source CMS for educators who want to create online courses.
Plone	Open source CMS platform and collaboration tool.
Boddington	Open source Virtual Learning Environment to support teaching, learning and research.
Elgg	Open source CMS/ social platform.
Yahoo! For Teachers	Online tool for educators to create, publish and share lessons using search widget called “Gobbler.”
Leonardo Da Vinci Project	EU initiative for lifelong learning.
Université Catholique de Louvain > Caroline	This software is a web-based course management system that allows students to download course materials onto smart phones.
Docebo	Open source CMS with community features (forums, chat).

It’s About People, Not Technology

In the end, the solution to the issue of digital inclusion is one built around a symbiotic relationship between those who back the initiative, working together to empower educators to optimise global open education and, in the process, bridging the technological, community and content divide.