I attended my first day of my first Open Education Conference today in Park City, Utah. What I came away with is that there are some incredibly brilliant and passionate people doing some pretty remarkable things in the way of making education more globally accessible.

One such startup, OpenStudy, was created to provide for greater access to educational materials while also focusing on the experience. The site attempts to engage learners by using online environments in which they are already immersed. Their Open Social Learning allows for easy exchange of information about topics and draws in other learners into conversations as they crowd-source answers to questions posted. There are also elements of game play with the addition of ratings and badges. The final process in the project is to collect and correlate data related to overall student success in their "real world" classes.

Another venture, OER Glue, is pretty exciting. As course creators surf the Internet for interesting content, they can "slurp" (their word, not mine) the media into the resource collector for later use in the context of a course through a simple interface. The designer has the choice of whether they snapshot the content or leave it dynamic when presented to the student to account for sites that may die over time.

Finally, there is the Open Course Library project which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Washington State Legislature. This initiative is providing for the design of platform agnostic content modules that can be created, published and shared easily by instructors. The project's first phase comes to a close on October 31, 2011 with the release of their first 42 courses.

This is a great meeting so far and it's easy to see why it generates such electricity amongst attendees. Educators are learning how to do more with less and seeing what their partners in education are positioning themselves to provide in the very near future. Things should get even more exciting in the world of education in the next five to ten years!

On a side note, I also learned that the Under Secretary of Education, Dr. Martha Kanter, shares my ENFJ personality type.