Talis launches angel fund for Open Education at ALT’s September conference

Talis, a sponsoring member of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), launched the Talis Incubator for Open Education at the ALT Conference in September http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2009/.

The scheme provides funding of up to £15,000 to help individuals or small groups who have “big ideas about furthering the cause of Open Education”. www.talis.com/education/incubator.

Talis says supported projects will be required "to ‘open source’ the results and return the intellectual property back to the community".

Seb Schmoller, Chief Executive for ALT, comments, “We’re delighted that Talis is launching this constructive scheme at the ALT conference, and we want to see it succeed. We are particularly pleased that Talis will be consulting conference participants on the long term shape of the scheme, and that it will be using the ALT Open Access Repository to host the scheme’s output.”

Potential projects that could be funded under the scheme include:

• Creation and publication of Open Education Resources for others to use

• Creation of a new (or extension of an existing) open source software tool allowing educators to author content

• Creation of datasets related to the field of Open Education – for example, you could curate or publish data relating to all open syllabi as linked open data

• Conducting a research study of how Open Assessment could be applied to a particular subject area and submitting this to a relevant conference

• Working towards the creation and adoption of open standards and frameworks that support the adoption of Open Education.

The scheme runs for 12 months, and awards will be made to successful applicants in two rounds during the year. Talis is currently pulling together a review board of people from the Open Education community to review submitted project proposals, ensuring the community has a significant voice in choosing successful applicants.

Talis’ review board includes the likes of David Wiley, arguably the most influential person in open education and Andy Lane of Open Learn, more information can be found at: http://www.talis.com/education/incubator/review-board.

As a sponsoring member of the Association for Learning Technology, Talis officially launched the scheme at ALT-C 2009, 8-10 September, Manchester (UK). Talis ran a consultation session on the first day, Tuesday 8th September where details of the scheme were discussed and feedback gained from the community.