Promoting international cultural and academic collaborative communication through technologies of open course ware

In the diverse cultures of an increasingly transnational world where\ud academic literacy in English or Englishes is required for advancement in\ud universities, communication technologies play critical roles. This paper integrates\ud scholars from diverse cultures through online technology which allows for\ud participants from several universities to develop their awareness of diverse\ud cultures and academic English across disciplines. This research addresses the issue\ud of how online collaboration among scholars can develop their technological,\ud cultural and academic literacies which are essential to their academic progress. By\ud creating electronic discussion forums that include scholars from universities\ud worldwide it is possible to engage in transcultural dialogue regarding how diverse\ud cultures view technology as a means to advance academic and cultural literacy.\ud Through combining the wealth of academic Open Course Ware (OCW) through\ud the consortium and linkages with international universities it is possible to create\ud credit courses for students in each of their home universities thereby overcoming\ud the major limitation of OCW by providing access to credit for OCW courses

The Promise of Open Educational Resources

This whitepaper defines OER, discusses what underlies the open educational resources movement and the current status of open educational resources, presents MIT's OpenCourseware project as a case-study, and concludes with future visions for teaching and learning, challenges, and observations

Open Courseware: A Unique Opportunity for India

The pivotal role of education as an instrument of social change - by altering the human perspective and transforming the traditional mindset of society is well recognized. The universalisation of education has become the top priority, especially for the developing countries. But the extension of quality education to remote and rural regions becomes a Herculean task for a large country like India with multi-lingual and multi-cultural population separated by vast geographical distances, and, in many instances, inaccessible terrain. Open Courseware (OCW) is part of a comparatively new educational movement in the line of Open Access (OA) and leading institutions and universities around the world are capitalizing it for the betterment of the society. OCW provides learners an opportunity to disseminate knowledge beyond the traditional classroom environment. The present study aims to spread the word of OCW and sensitize the teachers and learners about the tremendous potential of OCW in the context of education in Indi

Open educational resources : conversations in cyberspace

172 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.Libro ElectrónicoEducation systems today face two major challenges: expanding the reach of education and improving its quality. Traditional solutions will not suffice, especially in the context of today's knowledge-intensive societies. The Open Educational Resources movement offers one solution for extending the reach of education and expanding learning opportunities. The goal of the movement is to equalize access to knowledge worldwide through openly and freely available online high-quality content. Over the course of two years, the international community came together in a series of online discussion forums to discuss the concept of Open Educational Resources and its potential. This publication makes the background papers and reports from those discussions available in print.--Publisher's description.A first forum : presenting the open educational resources (OER) movement. Open educational resources : an introductory note / Sally Johnstone -- Providing OER and related issues : an introductory note / Anne Margulies, ... [et al.] -- Using OER and related issues : in introductory note / Mohammed-Nabil Sabry, ... [et al.] -- Discussion highlights / Paul Albright -- Ongoing discussion. A research agenda for OER : discussion highlights / Kim Tucker and Peter Bateman -- A 'do-it-yourself' resource for OER : discussion highlights / Boris Vukovic -- Free and open source software (FOSS) and OER -- A second forum : discussing the OECD study of OER. Mapping procedures and users / Jan Hylén -- Why individuals and institutions share and use OER / Jan Hylén -- Discussion highlights / Alexa Joyce -- Priorities for action. Open educational resources : the way forward / Susan D'Antoni

Organic Centre Wales Factsheet 23: OCW Benchmarking Project: costs of production for organic milk, beef and lamb

This factsheet describes an Organic Centre Wales, supported by Farming Connect, project to benchmark organic dairy, beef and sheep enterprises. The results provide a good basis for understanding the financial contribution of individual enterprises to the farm business, as well as a better basis for price setting. In 2004/5, data from over 50 organic farms in Wales (almost 10% of the total) was collected and analysed using standard Farm Business Survey methods. Data are presented and findings for variable costs and sales and the future for the organic market explained

From open resources to educational opportunity

Since MIT’s bold announcement of the OpenCourseWare initiative in 2001, the content of over 700 of its courses have been published on the Web and made available for free to the world. Important infrastructure initiatives have also been launched recently with a view to enabling the sustainable implementation of these educational programmes, through strengthening organizational capacity as well as through building open, standards‐based technology. Each of these initiatives point to a rich palette of transformational possibilities for education; together with the growing open source movement, they offer glimpses of a sustainable ecology of substantial and quality educational resources. This discussion piece will highlight some of the educational opportunity presented by MIT’s current information technology‐enabled educational agenda and related initiatives, along with their strategic underpinnings and implications. It will address various dimensions of their impact on the form and function of education. It will examine how these ambitious programmes achieve a vision characterized by an abundance of sustainable, transformative educational opportunities, not merely pervasive technology

Data reveals how organic costs compare with those for conventional production

Organic Centre Wales, supported by Farming Connect, is benchmarking organic dairy, beef and sheep enterprises. The results provide a good basis for understanding the financial contribution of individual enterprises to the farm business, as well as a better basis for price setting. This article presents organic and conventional milk, beef and lamb production costs and net margins for 2004/05

Communicating with organic producers in Wales

This paper reviews the services and activities through which the research and development community communicates with producers in Wales. These include publications (in hard copy and electronic media), one to one advisory services and group activities. It examines the appropriateness of different approaches for different situations, and makes the case for better integration of services under the new rural development plan

Stochastic expansions using continuous dictionaries: L\'{e}vy adaptive regression kernels

This article describes a new class of prior distributions for nonparametric function estimation. The unknown function is modeled as a limit of weighted sums of kernels or generator functions indexed by continuous parameters that control local and global features such as their translation, dilation, modulation and shape. L\'{e}vy random fields and their stochastic integrals are employed to induce prior distributions for the unknown functions or, equivalently, for the number of kernels and for the parameters governing their features. Scaling, shape, and other features of the generating functions are location-specific to allow quite different function properties in different parts of the space, as with wavelet bases and other methods employing overcomplete dictionaries. We provide conditions under which the stochastic expansions converge in specified Besov or Sobolev norms. Under a Gaussian error model, this may be viewed as a sparse regression problem, with regularization induced via the L\'{e}vy random field prior distribution. Posterior inference for the unknown functions is based on a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We compare the L\'{e}vy Adaptive Regression Kernel (LARK) method to wavelet-based methods using some of the standard test functions, and illustrate its flexibility and adaptability in nonstationary applications.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOS889 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org