The Talis Education Division has announced an angel fund to help Open Education projects – the Talis Incubator for Open Education.

The Talis Incubator for Open Education provides funding of up to £15,000 to help individuals or small groups who have big ideas about furthering the cause of Open Education. All Talis asks in return is that the project deliverables are ‘open sourced’ and the intellectual property returned back to the community, allowing it to be used freely. Talis won’t, and never will, exert any rights to the intellectual property or ideas that are funded.

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.

Talis believe the principals behind Open Education are going to have a big impact on how education is accessed, assessed and certified in the future. Therefore, by joining in conversation with others who share this view, and helping ideas develop, Talis can work towards a future where everyone can use the web to share, use, and reuse knowledge openly.

Chris Clarke, Talis Education Division Programme Manager commented:

“Talis believe in shared innovation. This is the view that whatever field an organisation is involved with, there will always be more people innovating outside of the organisation than within. Shared innovation is about work together towards a common goal – and this is exactly what Talis are doing by launching the Talis Incubator for Open Education scheme.”

You can read more about shared innovation on the Talis website at http://blogs.talis.com/sharedinnovation.

The scheme runs for 12 months, and awards will be made to successful applicants in two rounds during the year. Talis are 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.

As a sponsoring member of the Association for Learning Technology, Talis will be officially launching the scheme at ALT-C 2009, 8-10 September, Manchester (UK). Talis will be running a consultation session on the first day, where details of the scheme will be discussed feedback sought from the community.