I usually don’t cover top ten lists of courses — there’s an awful lot of them, and if I started to cover them all, I’d really have time to do nothing else. But Education Portal is a very popular site that’s spent an awful lot of time promoting OCW, in lists such as the 7 Universities Offering Free Natural Sciences Courses Online, and 10 Colleges and Universities with Free Online Liberal Studies Courses. In any case they’ve put together a list of the Top Ten Free Online Course Sites, and if you’re are doing OCW it’s worth a look. Your institution could even be on it, and if it is, you might follow the example of Top Ten awardee UC Irvine and use that to promote your school. Putting together a press release not only increases exposure for your OCW project, but when tied to a reputable ranking like Education Portal’s, it reminds people in your institution that your OCW site continues to generate interest in your college or university. Think of this as a continuation of Making the Case…
Monthly Archive for October, 2008
We’re very excited to announce that University of Alaska Fairbanks has joined the OCWC. From Chris Lott, a technologist on the project, via his blog Ruminate:
Having finally negotiated the administrative paperwork necessary to proceed, the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) has officially begun its open education initiative– uLearn– by becoming a member of the OpenCourseWare consortium (OCW). We don’t have a cool site to debut ala BC Campus’ Free Learning site (from which we plan to liberally crib) or even a single course put up yet! But we do have plans…
As Chris says, the site is nascent, but the plans are fairly developed. Rather than offer all their courses online uLearn will:
focus on a few academic areas– including information fluency, ocean science, and Arctic, Circumpolar and Alaska oriented fields– and in service of some underserved needs such as courses based wholly on open materials and offerings which address integration of learning community and social learning interactions.
You should check out the descriptions of the four major initiatives over at the site, but the one I find most fascinating is the Ocean Sciences distance curriculum:
At the Center for Distance Education we have developed one of a very few wholly web-based Ocean Science laboratory courses that will be– in its current configuration– particularly useful to faculty wishing to deliver a– or enhance an existing– ocean science course to distance students. Our geographic location and current events have demanded a particular emphasis on climate change, sea ice, and other circumpolar concerns that make this course unique. We hope to develop a version of this course that will be as useful to independent learners as it already is to those in a guided education environment.
In other words, this is already a unique course — a hands-on lab, no less — that was developed for distance learners. In conversations I’ve had with the Center, they’ve stressed to me how transformative this class has been for them — they are not only teaching a hands-on lab to a worldwide audience — but because they have that worldwide student body submitting lab data to them, the class has become an invaluable tool for data collection on the state of oceans around the globe. If they can preserve that aspect in their delivery of the OCW version (which will have a peer to peer support aspect), the potential upside for our knowledge of the world is huge.
Congratulations UAF! We look forward to seeing uLearn grow.
This is really pretty neat, although the focus is very narrow:
In an effort to jump-start the creation of freely available, easily understood classroom lessons and textbooks about parallel computing, Rice is co-sponsoring a contest with $500 cash prizes for the five best lessons submitted to the open-education site Connexions. The contest – the 2008-’09 Open Education Cup – will kick off Nov. 15-21 in Austin, Texas, at SC08, the world’s largest annual supercomputing convention and trade show.
Much of the rest of the press release deals with the education problem this addresses. With the advent of consumer multi-core processors, techniques which were once the domain of supercomputing are now needed for a much wider range of applications — but the courses to teach these techniques just don’t exist currently in most CS departments.
What I find most interesting about this is the overall cost. Outside the administration of this contest (which admittedly is most of the cost to Rice), the cost of offering five $500 cash prizes is $2500.
If this approach is successful, Rice may end up bettering the education of hundreds or thousands of students with these five classes — for what amounts to pocket change. This is obviously a nascent, very narrowly focused effort. But if it is successful, I can’t imagine it not being a model for at least some future development of OCW, in areas far more diverse.
OCWC President Steve Carson was recently a guest on Talis, a UK-based podcast, about the Consortium. The show is 27 minutes long. In the interview, Steve talks about where we came from, where we are now, and what the future may hold. You can find the podcast here.
Ok, so maybe that headline is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. The OpenShare mod for Moodle makes granular sharing of Moodle course resources easy, and is an easy way for Moodle using institutions to do an initial OCW implementation.
Partially due to our abject begging, Jared Stein has released a screencast OpenShare mod for Moodle. For those without Moodle installations, well, this will probably not be that exciting a video for you. But if you use Moodle or are considereing using Moodle, and you are interested in sharing your courses without having to open up your classes, do yourself a favor and see how easy this can be:
You can let Jared know what you think, or ask questions about the mod at his blog entry on this screencast.
For the OCWC Regional Meeting in Houston this February we will be focusing on questions of of how we work together. From the Call for Papers we put up today:
As the OpenCourseWare movement has matured, collaboration with others, both inside and outside the movement, has been a key ingredient to its success. In many institutions, OCW efforts have relied upon collaborations among various academic units, and OCW staff are often working with admissions or alumni offices toward common institutional goals. Beyond the institutional level, we find colleges and universities collaborating with one another on joint projects. On the technical side, numerous projects, from tool creation to infrastructure development, are being shared with the community as a whole.
It’s time to take stock of these efforts, to pool our knowledge on what works and what doesn’t. What alliances and methodologies have we found effective? What collaborations does the future hold? What sort of partnerships are working now, and what partnerships should we be looking to form in the coming years?
This conference will focus on how we connect and collaborate, within our institutions, with our neighbors throughout the Americas and with the global community. Papers which highlight collaboration will receive precedence. The conference is open to all, but will focus on work being done in the Americas. It will be multilingual, with an emphasis on Spanish and English; if submissions permit, we will run multiple language tracks each session.
This OCWC regional meeting will be part of the annual Connexions conference, and will be held in Houston February 5-6, with an optional Saturday event. The agenda for the regional meeting is here, we will link to the full conference agenda when available.
If you have done any collaboration within your institution or with other institutions, please read the Call for Papers, and consider using our online form to submit a proposal (linked from the submission instructions in the Call).
Been meaning to get to this for some time: a week or so ago, Students for a Free Culture approved what they are calling the “Wheeler Declaration”, a short definition of what defines an “Open University”:
An open university is one in which
- The research the university produces is open access.
- The course materials are open educational resources.
- The university embraces free software and open standards.
- If the university holds patents, it readily licenses them for free software, essential medicines, and the public good.
- The university network reflects the open nature of the internet.
where “university” includes all parts of the community: students, faculty, administration.
Two thoughts:
- It’s in no way a surprising document, but it is an elegant statement which is going to serve the Free Culture movement well. Having worked on such statements before, I can tell you people underestimate how difficult it can be to keep these simple and meaningful. They done it, and they done it good.
- I love the ending, which is something so often forgotten in the open education movement: openness does not end with the classroom. It shouldn’t be a special burden on faculty alone. There’s much to be gained from encouraging students and staff to share their work with the world, and to find more transparent ways of operation, thoughtout the institution.
All my personal opinions, of course — but wondering what others think.
I mentioned the varieties of approaches to running open courses are coming fast and furious these days. In addition to the P2PU model, people might want to also check out the “enveloped learning” model that Leigh Blackall is hashing out at Otago.
The basic idea seems to be instead of starting with a course frame (”Intro to Small Business”) and filling it with course readings and events that make sense only within the context of the course, you allow a more episodic structure to the course which allows the public to hop in and out. The structure of the course is still there, and as with many things that are structured episodically, the effect of the whole should be greater than the parts, but the class is effectively opened up to the public:
The point is the certificates, diplomas and degrees are still there, and all the events and activities are coordinated around them, but the general public have access to the content and activities without necessarily committing to the certificate, diploma or degree. Some people will want to commit to that straight off the bat (such as our young school leavers) and nothing is stopping that either. This approach envelops many different levels of interest in the learning and optionally progresses people toward a credential if that has value to them. Hillary’s job is to currate the learning programme (similar to that of a film festival coordinator perhaps), and to facilitate people’s association and progress through that programme, in a fashion of free ranging like being the rain. (Those links help that last sentence make sense).
As to who pays:
How does it pay? Well, the formally enrolled pay as normal. They enrol in the course up front and commit to all that is required. They receive their study allowance and start accumulating their study debt (or pay up front), we receive our subsidy for their enrollment, and they have access to all the content and learning support and assessment services that are afforded to them normally. As for the people taking advantage of the open access, they have access to the short events with an admission fee to cover costs if any. All sessions (where practical) are recorded and published for free online use. The longer sessions that these events feed into also have admission fees to cover costs and the content to support the activities are similarly available online for free. Obviously the online versions simply support the face to face events and activities.
The emphasis of the pilot Otago is looking at putting together seems very tied into a local community focus, the sort of college-city partnership which we are seeing work in other areas, such as service-learning initiatives. Here the college is structuring the program to be helpful to small businesses in Otago itself, and the global access to materials will be to some extent an effect of their focus on local access.
You’ll have to read the presentation yourself to get a real sense of the program. But it reminds me of some of the things that Keene State College was looking at in terms of local partnership when I was there, and it’s fascinating to see open access education (or open interaction, or whatever we are going to call it) grabbed from the local end of the stick.
If you are working for an institution that is strongly committed to local development partnerships, definitely take a look.
The Peer-to-Peer University is hurtling towards a launch in 2009. I say hurtling, because just four weeks ago this was still an idea. An idea with some great backers, and an idea which got traction at iSummit 2008, but an idea nonetheless. The feedback from the Logan OCWC conference session seems to have convinced the people involved to throw the switch.Â
And throw the switch they did. Â Already an awful lot is in place:
- Advisory Group: includes, among others, the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, the Executive Director of ccLearn, and David Wiley.Â
- A strong core team, including Delia Browne, Jan Philipp Schmidt, Stian Håklev, and Neeru Paharia.
- A project website: Including the Concept Document, and contact info for those that want to run a course, and a good description of what learning at P2PU will look like.
- Great coverage: The Chronicle has just featured the project in its Multimedia section.Â
- Students, who pay a trivial fee to prove commitment to participating in the course — the fee goes to the charity of their choice after they complete the course.
- Tutors, who act more like a “party host” than a traditional tutor — pushing the participants to interact, starting conversations, maintaining the forward momentum of the course.
- Sense-makers, who design the courses in ways that may initially look much like OCW (I assume, in fact, that existing OCW will often form the basis for some of the initial courses). Some Sense-makers may be professors, but others may hold no formal degree, and P2PU is interested in faculty that may have expertise in an area but lack a degree.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England has announced a new initiative that could jumpstart wider OCW production in England:
HEFCE has announced an initial ÂŁ5.7 million of funding for pilot projects that will open up existing high-quality education resources from higher education institutions to the world.
The Higher Education Academy and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) will work in partnership to deliver the 12-month pilot projects. These will run at institutional, subject and individual level along with accompanying support services. The projects will be formally launched in April 2009.
I’m a bit unclear reading the announcement on whether there will be a call for proposals as they distribute this money, or whether the pilot projects are being developed centrally (can any Brits translate the phrase “Invitations to tender” for me?). But in either case the funding is bound to intersect with OpenCourseWare initiatives:
Open educational resources could include full courses, course materials, complete modules, notes, videos, assessments, tests, simulations, worked examples, software, and any other tools or materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge. These resources will be released under an intellectual property license that permits open use and adaptation.
As a result of this agreement institutions will be encouraged to share and reuse learning content - enhancing productivity for educators and students. Ultimately we hope that learning materials and resources will be shared universally - locally, nationally and globally, to support learning.
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