International Learning Communities and Resources

Last November, I had the great pleasure of attending a pre-conference workshop The Power of online learning. Making a difference.at 13th Annual Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning. The workshop, lead by Ken Udas of Penn State,Christine Geith, Asst. Provost, Exec. Director of MSU Global, Michigan State University,and Wayne Mackintosh, Commonwealth of Learning (COL) was my first glimpse into this extraordinary community of international educators devoted to providing open access to educational resources, tools, and information on a global scale, primarily to developing countries These educators, designers, and builders of global communities also see flexible and open educational sources as vehicles to the reduction of of poverty, and the promotion of peace and independence. Providing learning at a distance to isolated communities or those with limited financial or technological resources requires creative work-arounds or using older delivery methods, such as radio broadcasts, to make content available to the educators and their pupils. However, for some of these collaborative communities, such as the Commonwealth of Learning, UNESCO, or ICDE, the means of providing content seems not so nearly important as to help countries achieve overreaching goals to develop culturally, educationally, and economically. The COL also makes use of OSS [open source software] to aide in the development of delivery platforms and OER [open educational resources] for content availability. The WikiEducator is one such blending of OSS and OER. The planet feels quite a bit smaller to me all of a sudden --Tracey