Center for Open Learning & Teaching

In 2011, a small team explored the opportunity to establish a Center for Open Learning and Teaching (COLT) at the University of Mississippi. COLT’s purpose would be to establish the university in a leadership role in leveraging the benefits of Open Educational Practices (OEP) and Open Educational Resources (OER) to transform the practice of education. This document records the four main opportunities identified in the project: a project to build a high quality and widely distributed history of OER/OEP on Wikipedia and other sites; a local teaching and learning center at Mississippi; an international open education research consortium; and a consulting practice promoting open education as a Quality Enhancement Plan, to support the southern U.S. colleges and universities in their reaccreditation processes.

The team began with Dr. Robert Cummings (Ole Miss) and Pete Forsyth (Wiki Strategies), and grew to include Dr. Alexis Hart (VMI), and Dr. Paul Quick (University of Georgia).