[Open-education] Flooved: Open Educational Resources Platform

[McKiernan, Gerard [LIB]]

*** Spoiler Alert > Possible Duplicate Posting ***

Colleagues/

Posted on behalf of Uri Grodzinski, Flooved

Disclaimer: This is for information purposes only and does not constituent a formal endorsement.

/Gerry

How it works: Along the lines of the Open Access movement, we source our content directly from leading lecturers (currently focusing on Maths and Physics), who share our vision that access to educational materials should be free. These consist of open-access textbooks, unpublished textbooks or extremely high quality lecture notes which we call proto-textbooks. In addition we have some textbooks which are in print, where the author holds the digital copyright and granted us permission to upload their book [Snip]

A combination of automatically-assigned topics and metadata and a vetting process involving lecturers and PhD candidates make sure that students (and others) can easily find all of this free content on flooved.com. In addition to the cost saved by using our OER, registered users (registration is 100% free and requires nothing but an email address) enjoy a host of very useful features, which create a layer of social content on top of the existing texts:

• User-profiles helps students and lecturers track what they read and see what their peers are reading and recommending.
• Annotations and social annotations – to comment and create a discussion over the course material.
• Q&A  - with questions answered by peers as well as by tutors.

What can you do?

1. Advocate Contributing OER on flooved.com:

In order to make the content lecturers have already produced freely available and easily accessible to students worldwide. We encourage authors to submit their content as a creative Commons ‘Attribution 3.0 Unported' licence, and the default license is a non-exclusive royalty free worldwide license which can be revoked at the author’s discretion.

2. Advocate Using OER:

We are always happy to see lecturers and students interacting over the open content on our platform, and to know that they are benefit ting from high-quality content and from their interaction over it. Lecturers, or the students themselves, often open a ‘course profile’ where they link to flooved content, and external OER, relevant to their course syllabus. We encourage that and are happy to help them find relevant content from our great collection.

3. Advocate and set-up OER in your library:

We are ready, willing and able to help librarians integrate our resources into their library search results, so that their students can easily find our OER when they enter a search query. We will also provide the library with usage analytics (we are currently working towards meeting the COUNTER standard for such analytics, but intend to provide much more detailed pattern of usage and interaction. For more details, and to get your institution’s metadata file so that you can assess this more thoroughly, please contact me at uri at FLOOVED.COM .

A final note – we hope to offer university libraries, lecturers and students a wonderful free alternative to expensive textbooks. But it’s important to note that the dramatic reduction in costs is not our main advantage over traditional textbooks. Instead, it’s the resulting, more efficient way of studying, when you are less busy searching for relevant material and can use most of your time for studying. It’s the interactions with other students, from course mates to similarly-minded peers from the other side of the world, and it’s the unique, continuous interaction between students and their lecturers. These are the things we like the most about our platform.

We appreciate your feedback very much and will in most cases also act upon it as much as we can, so please feel free to drop us a line, or just reply here.

Looking forward to hearing from you,
Uri Grodzinski

***********************************************************************
Dr Uri Grodzinski
uri at FLOOVED.COM
Head of Content & Analytics, Flooved
www.flooved.com

Postdoctoral researcher
Department of Psychology
University of Cambridge
Downing Street, Cambridge
CB2 3EB

Source and Full Text Available Via:

[ http://digital-textbooks.blogspot.com/2013/10/flooved-open-educational-resources_6.html ]

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
and
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University
152 Parks Library
Ames IA 50011

"It's Not The Journey; It's The Detours."

http://ref-notes.blogspot.com/2013/09/its-not-journey-its-detours.html
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