Open.Michigan
Encyclopedia
Open.Michigan is a collection of open initiatives and projects at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

 (U-M). Open.Michigan supports the open access and use of U-M resources for teaching, learning, and research. Open.Michigan promotes open content licensing and supports the reuse, redistribution, and remixing of educational materials for use by others worldwide. Some of the key efforts underway under the Open.Michigan umbrella include U-M’s Open Educational Resources
Open educational resources
Open educational resources are digital materials that can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more, made available for free through open licenses, which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone...

 publishing activities, development of software tools that support creating open content, and various open content repositories.

Open Educational Resources

A major component of Open.Michigan is the Open Educational Resources
Open educational resources
Open educational resources are digital materials that can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more, made available for free through open licenses, which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone...

 (OER) initiative, which supports and promotes the creation of OER and publishes those resources on U-M’s OER website. Current participants include the Medical School, School of Information, School of Dentistry, College of Engineering, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, School of Nursing, School of Public Health, School of Education, and College of Literature, Science and the Arts .

Health OER

In fall 2007, the University of Michigan Medical School committed to publishing all pre-clinical curriculum materials as OER and worked with the School of Information to develop the dScribe publishing process. In 2008, a planning grant award from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is a private foundation, established by Hewlett-Packard cofounder William Reddington Hewlett and his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett in 1967. The Hewlett Foundation awards grants to support educational and cultural institutions and to advance certain social and...

 supported U-M’s work to hold a workshop in Ghana
Ghana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...

 and develop a proof-of-concept effort for converting health education materials to OER . In 2009, U-M, OER Africa, and four African universities received a follow-on grant from Hewlett to build on this work and develop an OER program to support health education.

dScribe

To facilitate the creation of OER, Open.Michigan developed a process called dScribe. This process uses students, acting as dScribes, and faculty working together to gather, review, and publish learning materials. The dScribe model uses a suite of software tools to manage the process of gathering, vetting, and publishing course material. The process begins with CTools, the University of Michigan's implementation of the Sakai CLE
Sakai Project
This page is about the software project, for other meanings, see Sakai.Sakai is a community of academic institutions, commercial organizations and individuals who work together to develop a common Collaboration and Learning Environment...

(Collaboration and Learning Environment). dScribes export the course materials from CTools, and then upload those materials to OERca which automatically scans the materials for any content objects (images). OERca also serves as a processing tool for managing content copyright status and tracking student-faculty interactions. The content is then deposited into Open.Michigan's instance of eduCommons, an open source OER publishing platform.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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