Welcome to New Members

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We’d like to welcome the following institutional members, whose applications were approved in November and December:

The Open University of Israel (Israel)
Open Institute of Law (Russia)
Fundação Getulio Vargas / FGV Online (Brazil)
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Universidad Internacional de Andalucía
Universidad de Chile
Universidad de Granada
Universidad Metropolitana
Universidad Monteávila
Universidad Nacional Experimental del Táchira
Universidad Fermín Toro

Links to the websites of these institutions can be found on our blog entry on new members (http://bit.ly/zuYL), or if you want to see the full list of members, you can view our member list on the site (http://www.oeconsortium.org/members/consortium-members.html).

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We’re taking registrations for the Connexions Conference / OCWC Regional Meeting in Houston this February. The OCWC portion is focused on collaboration, particularly in the Americas. You can learn more at http://cnxconference.rice.edu/.

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We took a major step forward last month by making the Toolkit public. Thanks to all the hard work all of our Toolkit Group members put into constructing this helpful guide.

Much work remains, however. Over the next six months we will be drafting some of the less developed portions of the toolkit, and in particular we hope to supplement much of the text with small case studies provided by our members.

We’re not looking for ten page papers here – just a one page history of your OCW project, for example, or a couple paragraphs on how you went about setting up your technical infrastructure, or and explanation of how you deal with IP issues at your institutions. It can be a rough draft; we’ll edit for sense and grammar. The benefit for your institution will be prominent placement in the Toolkit – you can see what these “sidebar” case studies look like here: http://bit.ly/s4IJ.

New (and Old) Ways to Get OCW Info

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As you can see, we’re re-launching the OCWC newsletter, which we aim to put out once a month from this point forward. But we’re also communicating in a couple other ways of which you might not be aware — so here’s a brief tour of our media empire:

The Front Page: The front page of the ocwconsortium.org site contains a list of recent stories in the mainstream media and higher education press pertaining to Open Education, OCW, and OCWC members. We would particularly like to feature coverage of our OCWC members in the press, so if your OCW project recieves some coverage in the press, even if it’s local, please send us a link and we’ll see if we can feature it. Non-English coverage is welcome (in fact, it’s very much desired).

The OCW News Feed: This is a list of recent stories or blog postings that might be of interest to our members. Note that we are not necessarily endorsing the stories linked here, just bringing them to your attention. The links include press coverage of OCW, funding announcements, blog postings about OCW issues, and related topics of interest to the OCW community. You can read it at twitter.com/ocwnews, or ‘follow ocwnews’ on twitter, or add it to your newsreader from the twitter page.

The Blog: The OCWBlog (http://ocwblog.org/) posts a couple times a week, usually extending commentary on stories you might have seen in the other channels. We’d like to make it a place where the community can come to comment on issues relevant to us all. So please, stop by, and if you have something you’d like to write up for the blog, let us know.

The Facebook Group: Join the group on Facebook for purely utilitarian communication — new conferences, initiatives, requests for papers. We promise we’ll keep it sparse!

One final note — forums and social media are something we are still hashing out how to do best. Our feeling is that most strong communities are built on strong communication and shared purpose, so it’s our hope that in getting regular communication out to you we may be helping to start building that community even if we’re not hosting it. Right now, you should feel free to connect with people in the Facebook group and to follow the discussions posted on OER Blogs.

Resources:

Front page: http://ocwconsortium.org/

Send Us Your News!

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Ideally, we’d like much more of this newsletter to be about the accomplishments of our member institutions. If you have any news to share, however small, send it to feedback@ocwconsortium.org. Milestones, the number of courses published this semester, local coverage of your project – anything is welcome. You send it – we’ll figure out if it might be interesting to our newsletter audience.

We look forward to your contributions, and hope to report on them in next month’s newsletter!