This study examines perceived benefits and costs of instructors who contributed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. While previous research has investigated the benefits and costs of OCW from the perspectives of the users and institution, the instructor's perspective is the focus of this qualitative…

We present Edaq530, a low-cost, compact and easy-to-use digital measurement solution consisting of a thumb-sized USB-to-sensor interface and measurement software. The solution is fully open-source, our aim being to provide a viable alternative to professional solutions. Our main focus in designing Edaq530 has been versatility and transparency. In…

Successful adoption of new teaching and learning technologies in higher education requires the consensus of two sub-cultures, namely the technologist sub-culture and the academic sub-culture. This paper examines trends in adoption of open source software (OSS) for teaching and learning by comparing the results of a 2009 survey of 285 Chief…

In the context of education, "open(ness)" has become the watermark for a fast growing number of learning materials and associated platforms and practices from a variety of institutions and individuals. Open Educational Resources (OER), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), and more recently, initiatives such as Coursera are just some of…

This article presents a case study of the adoption and use of open textbooks by three high school teachers in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. The textbooks, collaboratively authored and distributed through the South African initiative, Siyavula, are available online and are openly licensed, allowing teachers to freely use, modify,…

This research examines the usage of local learning material repositories at school, as well as related teachers' attitudes and training. The study investigates the use of these repositories for enhancing teacher performance and assesses whether the assimilation of the local repositories increases their usage of and contribution to by teachers. One…

As higher education embraces the ideologies of the market, educators are being asked to teach evermore students with fewer resources. Running counter to the trend of marketization, a decentralized group of educators are taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies (including Facebook, Twitter, and blogging platforms such as Wordpress, etc.) to…

One of the main barriers to the reuse of Open Educational Resources (OER) is language (OLnet, 2009). OER may be available but in a language that users cannot access, so a preliminary step to reuse is their translation or localization. One of the obvious solutions to the vast effort required to translate OER is to crowd-source the translation, as…

This paper describes work carried out at the Department of Chemical Engineering at UCL into the use of e-assessment in a second year module and, in particular, the student perceptions of this mode of assessment. Three quizzes were implemented in Moodle, the first two as formative assessment and the final quiz as summative assessment. The results…

If anyone had thought to recognize a K-12 educational buzzword of the year for 2012, it would surely have been "open educational resources" (OER). Ed tech media has fairly hummed with the topic, largely with exciting predictions: OER would give cash-strapped K-12 educators access to high-quality tools and content for their classrooms at little or…

This paper presents the open learning initiatives of the Science Education Institute of the Department of Science and Technology to overcome certain barriers, such as enabling access, cost of replication, timely feedback, monitoring and continuous improvement of learning modules. Using an open-education model, like MIT's (Massachusetts Institute…

The Internet has disrupted or threatened to disrupt the traditional business models in many different areas, including publishing, record companies, retail sales, motion pictures, and advertising. One potential source of disruption for higher education is online learning, especially the recent focus on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Can…

Open Source Software (OSS) communities are homogenous and their lack of diversity is of concern to many within this field. This problem is becoming more pronounced as it is the practice of many technology companies to use OSS participation as a factor in the hiring process, disadvantaging those who are not a part of this community. We should…

This paper describes how the use of free and open-source software (FOSS) can facilitate the application of constructive alignment theory in power systems engineering education by enabling the deep learning approach in power system analysis courses. With this aim, this paper describes the authors' approach in using the Power System Analysis Toolbox…

Based on the large number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the United States, their increasing interest in enterprise-wide software systems and their impact on the US economy, it is important to understand the determinants that can facilitate the successful implementation and assimilation of such technology into these firms' daily…