Open Innovation
Outstanding innovation that brings a new approach to open education. Ideas or solutions that present innovative applications of OER to create new opportunities or address existing challenges in open education.
University of Michigan OERbit Project – 2011
The Open.Michigan team at the University of Michigan worked with a local vendor to create and deploy OERbit for the Open.Michigan website. OERbit is a Drupal-based publishing platform to share publicly licensed learning resources (OER/OCW) with the world. The platform was designed with OER/OCW in mind and provides a basic set of functionalities for publishers, including courses and resources-based navigation, flexible content hierarchies, Creative Commons license integration, RSS distribution, and RDFa output. The code is open source and available for download.
University of Michigan, United States
Smarthistory – 2012
Smarthistory.org has grown in direct response to the needs of students enrolled in introductory art history courses. Smarthistory uses conversation and multimedia to make art history accessible and meaningful. Part of the Khan Academy, Smarthistory employs Flickr and on-site video to re-locate artwork in its historical and contemporary contexts. More than thirty art historians with varied specialties have contributed. Smarthistory was visited more than 170,000 times from more than 170 countries.
Smarthistory, United States
Peer 2 Peer University – 2013
Peer 2 Peer University created MOOC Maker, an email tool for offering Massive Open Online Courses, using OpenCourseWare and other Open Educational Resources. It was initially developed and used for a course called The Mechanical MOOC – A Gentle Introduction to Python, which enrolled 8,000 learners in the fall of 2012 and early 2013. The MOOC Maker was subsequently used to structure a course through the MIT Media Lab called Learning Creative Learning, which enrolled 24,000 learners.
Peer 2 Peer University, United States
Sesamath – 2014
Sésamath is an association committed to making free educational resources and tools for teaching mathematics via the Internet. Sésamath resources are created by volunteers, math professors, and school teachers. The resources are developed collaboratively on mailing lists, classroom-tested, and improved with feedback from the teachers. After a consensus is reached, the resources are made available on the Internet. It is not necessary to be a member of Sésamath to participate in the creative process, but collaborators must be willing to work under a free license and open sharing state of mind.
SESAMATH, France
Slidewiki – 2014
SlideWiki exploits the crowd’s wisdom, creativity, and productivity to create qualitative, rich, engaging educational content. With SlideWiki, users can design and collaborate on slides, diagrams, and assessments and then arrange this content in richly-structured course presentations. SlideWiki empowers communities of educators to author, share and re-use sophisticate