Summary
OPEN provides free support and technical assistance to all Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College & Career Training (TAACCCT) grantees with information and professional development in the following areas:
- Open licensing (“CC BY” is required by the grant)
- Increasing access to existing open educational resources (OER)
- Effective course and learning design
- Accessibility and web-based design best practices
- Best practices in open policy and OER adoption
Why these Services?
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Support for open licensingThe DOL grant requires that you share what you build with the public grant funds. All resources created (new builds and revisions) using grant funds must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY). CC BY is a copyright license that grants permission to the public to reuse, revise, remix or redistribute the materials for any purpose so long as the user gives attribution to the author. Creative Commons will provide technical support in meeting the open licensing requirement. We will help you implement CC BY with best practices in machine-readability (so that users can find your content on the Internet) and mark the content with clear and appropriate license icons and language. Creative Commons will also help projects find existing OER that might be used in their project. |
 
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Support for learning design and accessibilityCAST and the Open Learning Initiative (OLI), with experts at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford, will work together, leveraging current learning science research and accessibility guidelines, to provide resources and technical assistance to support the creation of high quality online courses. OLI brings expertise in applying results from the learning sciences to the design, implementation, evaluation and continuous improvement of open web-based learning environments. CAST, the research and development organization that pioneered Universal Design for Learning (UDL) brings expertise, technical support and enabling technologies. The resources and technical assistance from OLI and CAST will support you in implementing OLI learning guidelines, the UDL framework and techniques and technologies to ensure that all of the digital content and learning environments developed in this project succeed with the widest range of learners possible. |
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Support for the development of best practices and policiesThe Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) has had sustained, system-wide success creating open policy and developing, adopting, reusing and distributing OER. OER practices and policies may be new to your institution. SBCTC will support your efforts with targeted professional development opportunities and consultation for your faculty, administration and staff. Administrators and trustees will learn how to develop and support open policies; faculty and staff will learn to locate, develop, evaluate and share open content. |
Each OPEN partner has compiled resources to aid grantees in all of these areas. See the Resources and FAQ pages for more. Customized services to meet your particular needs are available on request. Send your request to taa@creativecommons.org.
Beyond support: Collaboration
Platform+
The OLI platform, enhanced by Universal Design for Learning principles, enables instructional designs that embed practice and assessment throughout the course and provide a complete, supported learning experience. The system captures data on student interactions and uses this data to provide meaningful feedback to the learner, the instructor, and the course designer. Platform+ projects have received technical training on the platform, project space for development, course hosting, and access to all learning data and reports. As Platform+ partners create materials, these will be publically available on the OLI community site: community.oli.cmu.edu.
Co-Development
For this more intensive collaboration, OLI is leading teams composed of multiple subject matter experts, CAST experts, course developers, learning scientists, human computer interaction experts, assessment experts and software engineers to develop and deliver OER in accordance with current learning research. Grantees from different projects in the same domain have been invited to collaborate on a single development team to create OER that serves all projects.
For a list of current Platform+ and Co-dev service participants, see the Resources page.
Want to get in touch?
See the Contact page to find out how.