Mentor Cloud and Open Doors Group / College Open Textbooks Partner to Facilitate Sharing Best Practices

 Mentor Cloud and Open Doors Group / College Open Textbooks Partner to
Facilitate Sharing Best Practices Among the Open Education Community
New Community to Share Best Practices and Facilitate Mentoring in Open Education 

Cupertino, CA, January 26, 2012 — In honor of National Mentoring Day, Mentor Cloud and Open Doors Group/College Open Textbooks announced today the availability of an education community that allows 24×7 discussion threads and broadcast email messages to all members by all members. Generally all members will be both mentors and mentees in keeping with 21^st century models of learning communities.

Education in the 21^st Century faces an enormous challenge:

• Peace, prosperity, and longevity require that a much larger share of the 8 billion global inhabitants have access to affordable quality education, and
• Current education processes cannot scale enough to meet this challenge; in particular it is impossible to train enough instructors.

Education in the 21^st Century is afforded three important opportunities to meet the above challenge:

• Telecommunications and computing technologies radically lower the cost of educational materials.
• Discoveries in pedagogy in the past century show that cooperative and developmental learning are far more effective than traditional methods.
• New business models including openly-licensed content and tools can remove barriers and create sustainable affordable learning.

Collaboration tools are needed in at least three areas of open education:

• Sharing of best practices: We cannot afford to reinvent processes in every institution, state/province, or country.
• Mentor/mentee relationships in careers and to make instructorless open courseware educationally sound. Open Courseware Consortium and Saylor Foundation have large numbers of open-licensed instructorless courses.
• Mentor/mentee tools to help create and facilitate relationships in the expanding Open Educational Resources (OER) movement.

OpenDoorsGroup.MentorCloud.com, powered by Mentor Cloud, is the tool that allows for all three of the above. During the beta period, OpenDoorsGroup.MentorCloud.com will be free of cost to individuals who are thought leaders and contributors in open education. Invitations will be sent starting in early February. There may be a fee for organizations that sign up 5 or more individuals as well as organizations looking to tap into the open education community. There will also be a fee for organizations that are looking for facilitators to drive conversations on certain topics and areas.

“There is absolutely a need for a central place for those in the open education community to share best practices” says Mitchell Levy, Co-Director, College Open Textbooks, who emphasizes that Mentor Cloud is a great tool to provide this level of service.

Contact Ravishankar Gundlapalli, Mentor Cloud, ravi@mentorcloud.com  650-520-3052 or Sharyn Fitzpatrick, Open Doors Group/College Open Textbooks, sharyn.fitzpatrick@happyabout.info  650-814-5835