OWL Institute

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The OWL Institute is pleased to announce the beta release of the OWL Portal. The OWL Portal integrates valuable Open Educational Resources (OER) with Moodle, the easy to operate open source learning management system in use worldwide. The OWL Portal bridges the gap between OER and the classroom, home school, teacher, and student, by organizing the best resources into courses that are immediately available for use, reuse and modification.

The Open Educational Resources movement is an exciting opportunity for advancing high-quality education beyond the barriers of traditional systems of education; nevertheless, the time, resources and costs for incorporating OER into learning and instruction still present significant obstacles for most members of the educational community. The OWL Portal addresses these issues head-on by building primary, secondary, and post-secondary courses using the best OER available. Teachers and students lacking the ICT infrastructure and skills to locate, incorporate and deliver OER can find them already placed in grade and subject specific courses, ready to go. Because of Moodle's intuitive and simple design, anyone can quickly and easily build their own courses and homepages with many handy tools available.

Based upon his research in communicative action theory, philosopher Timothy A. Torgerson founded the Open World Learning Institute (OWL Institute) in 2002 with the mission of expanding the public sphere within the digital world. Since then, OWL has sought to assist the world community in developing non-commercial access to high-quality education for anyone, anywhere, anytime. To further this mission, OWL partnered with ManyOne and the Digital Universe to provide a viable means of financial support to like-minded organizations by offering custom-branded ISP and email services. In addition to the OWL Portal, OWL is developing the Great Lakes Portal—as a sub-portal to the Digital Universe's already successful Earth Portal, the Great Lakes Portal would enable experts and the world community to share knowledge and build greater understanding of these natural wonders of North America. Also in development are Open Ed Centers, providing on-the-ground support to teachers, students, families, and communities seeking to use ICT for a better life.

[edit] yeter

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