Open Education 2015

OER, open content, open textbooks - whatever you call them, there are approximately one billion pieces of content in the world published under open licenses that allow you to engage in the 5R activities (retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute) in the service of learning. However, because open educational resources are born digital, their uses by both learners and teachers must be mediated by technology.

Several technical challenges present themselves as Lumen Learning works to make OER as easy to adopt as possible, such as:

- How do we create, store, manage, and display the attributions that are required by open licenses?
- How do make OER easy for faculty use in their LMSs - and in such a way that students' access to material doesn't end when the semester does?
- How do we make the 5Rs easy for faculty with limited technical expertise?
- How do provide easy offline access to OER?
- How do we better empower faculty to support student learning through assessment? - How do we align OER and open assessments with learning outcomes in ways that support rigorous research and enable continuous improvement?

In this presentation we will demo Lumen's open source platform for solving these problems (and many others) and describe our solutions, with particular attention to the role played by open standards like LTI, QTI, and Common Cartridge.

Lumen's open source platform combines and integrates many existing pieces of open source software - to which Lumen actively contributes - together with many newly developed pieces of open source software. Major pieces of the open source platform include Wordpress, Pressbooks, Candela Citations, Candela Outcomes, Candela LTI, Thin CC Export, Snapshot, and Open Embedded Assessments.