# Innovative projects in the publishing of OER


In October, University of Toronto participated in the world-wide [Open
Access Week](http://www.openaccessweek.org/) with a number of different
[events](http://discover.library.utoronto.ca/open-access-week/open-access-events).
I got the honor of starting off with the first event (although I believe
there was one event the week before), with a presentation about
Innovative projects in the publishing of OER. I've always been
interested in how different institutions and countries around the world
approach the production of OER, and have given presentations in the past
about the incredible wealth and diversity and projects out there. In
these presentations (linked from my
[presentations](http://reganmian.net/blog/publications-and-presentations)
page), I usually discuss the projects from a resource perspective - what
is out there, and how can we use it. This time, I decided to focus more
on why these different projects were set up, what their purpose is, who
runs them, and how they are sustained financially.

I started with [MIT](http://ocw.mit.edu), talked about [OpenCourseWare
Consortium](http://www.ocwconsortium.org/), and then the [dScribes
model](https://open.umich.edu/projects/oer.php#dscribe) at [University
of Michigan](http://umich.edu). I mentioned [University of
Oslo](http://uio.no), that makes all their curricula available freely as
a service to students, without ever thinking that it could be defined
"OER". I talked about the biggest university in the world, [Indira
Gandhi National Open University](http://www.ignou.ac.in/), and their
incredible resources in [eGyanKosh](http://www.egyankosh.ac.in/) and on
[Youtube](http://www.youtube.com/ignou).

Staying in India, I mentioned [the Youtube collection of the
IITs](http://www.youtube.com/nptelhrd). Then I talked about [Open
University UK](http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/), [China's Open Educational
Resources](http://jingpinke.com), [Wikiversity](http://wikiversity.org),
[Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative](http://cmu.edu/oli),
[Indian open
textbooks](http://www.ncert.nic.in/textbooks/testing/Index.htm) and
[Indonesian open textbooks](http://bse.invir.com/). I introduced [a
Norwegian project](http://ndla.no/) that is funding the production of
high school educational materials in a very novel way, [Free High School
Science Texts](http://www.fhsst.org/) in South Africa, [Flat World
Knowledge](http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/), [Open High School of
Utah](http://openhighschool.org/), and finally I did a brief
introduction of [Peer2Peer University](http://p2pu.org).

[![Screen shot 2009-11-19 at 9.59.21
PM](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Screen-shot-2009-11-19-at-9.59.21-PM.png "Screen shot 2009-11-19 at 9.59.21 PM")](http://connect.oise.utoronto.ca/p98085499/)

The entire presentation was recorded with Adobe Connect, and can be seen
[here](http://connect.oise.utoronto.ca/p98085499/), with both audio and
slides synchronized. Since that doesn't work for everyone, I also put up
an
[MP3](http://www.archive.org/details/InnovativeProjectsInThePublishingOfOpenEducationalResources)
of the presentation, and put the
[slides](http://www.slideshare.net/houshuang/innovative-projects-in-the-publishing-of-open-educational-resources)
on Slideshare.

A lot of this is new ground, and in some cases I don't know all the
details behind these projects and the decisions they have made. If you
have any examples of other interesting models for OER projects, or you
want to correct anything I stated in the presentation, I'd love to hear
from you.

Stian