OCWC Regional Meeting: Collaboration and Connection in the Americas

Conference Dates: February 5-6, 2009

As the OpenCourseWare movement has matured, collaboration with others, both inside and outside the movement, has been a key ingredient to its success. In many institutions, OCW efforts have relied upon collaborations among various academic units, and OCW staff are often working with admissions or alumni offices toward common institutional goals. Beyond the institutional level, we find colleges and universities collaborating with one another on joint projects. On the technical side, numerous projects, from tool creation to infrastructure development, are being shared with the community as a whole.

It’s time to take stock of these efforts, to pool our knowledge on what works and what doesn’t. What alliances and methodologies have we found effective? What collaborations does the future hold? What sort of partnerships are working now, and what partnerships should we be looking to form in the coming years?

This conference will focus on how we connect and collaborate, within our institutions, with our neighbors throughout the Americas and with the global community. Papers which highlight collaboration will receive precedence. The conference is open to all, but will focus on work being done in the Americas. It will be multilingual, with an emphasis on Spanish and English; if submissions permit, we will run multiple language tracks each session.

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Conference Themes

Each session will be 45 minutes long and may consist of individual speakers or a panel. The themes for the four sessions are:

• Internal Communications: How do we raise and sustain interest in our projects? How do we create a community of practice around OCW production? How do we engage our colleagues, their concerns and their priorities?
• Technology: How do we nurture technical innovation? How do we build a sharable infrastructure? How do we eliminate redundancy of effort?
• Legal Issues: How do we develop community standards? How do our collective efforts either mitigate or increase our vulnerability to lawsuit?
• Connecting with Potential Users: How do we partner with professional groups? How do we convert users into producers and contributors? How might we more effectively link users and resources?

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Submission Instructions

Submit an abstract (three sentences long) and a proposal (500 words or less), using the provided template. Describe your topic, project, and/or research related to the stated theme.

Speakers wishing to be on panels are encouraged to assemble their panel and submit a proposal as a group.

All presenters are required to register for the conference.

Acceptance announcements will be made within two weeks after the submission deadline. If your session was accepted for presentation, we strongly encourage you to provide associated presentation materials no later than seven days before the conference start date. Presentation materials should include any handouts, slide presentations, or other material. These materials will be posted on the OCWC conference wiki.

All submissions (brief description, long description and full papers) and presentations must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).

Submissions are due by November 20, 2008.

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Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance decisions will be made based on the following criteria:

A submission is RELEVANT when

• it directly address one or more of the conference themes

A submission is SIGNIFICANT when

• it raises and discusses issues important to improving the level of collaboration among open education efforts, and
• its contents can be broadly disseminated and understood.

A submission is PRODUCTIVE when

• it either recommends a series of next steps/best practices or indicates some means by which next steps could be identified.

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Reposting This Notice

Permission to repost this call for papers is granted, as long as you list and link to this document within your re-posting as the authoritative document. Use the URL http://cnxconference.rice.edu when linking to this document.