I’m not sure who Kevin Donovan is, but I just read this Georgetown student’s recent proposal that Georgetown produce OpenCourseWare, and it’s a great example of not only how to make the case as a student, but of how to make the OCW case in general.

He starts by directly citing a founding principle of the University:

“The age of nations is past. It remains for us now, if we do not wish to perish, to
set aside ancient prejudices and build the earth.”
**
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

The world has changed remarkably since Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. uttered those striking words which remain prominently affixed to the wall of the ICC, but today they ring as true as ever. The cosmopolitan character of both the Jesuits and Georgetown University reflect the sentiment of Teilhard and make a formative impression on students, faculty, and observers who look to Georgetown for scholastic leadership, an international perspective and innovative thinking.

Today, Georgetown has a unique opportunity to expand this institutional importance through the embrace of open educational resources. The international movement towards open educational resources has been made possible through improvements in information technology and an increasing recognition that openness is a necessary component of education.

He then demonstrates how OCW can provide benefits in the areas of social justice, reputation, scholastic collaboration, and increased quality, citing much material on the way, and relentlessly tying it to Georgetown’s stated goals. Here’s an example from the Social Justice section:

Unique to Georgetown is the level to which social justice is incorporated into its educational mission. Social justice is foundational to what it means to be a Hoya, past or present. It is not a separate sphere, relegated to time outside learning.

OpenCourseWare recognizes that education is a non-rival public good - one person’s use does not detract from the next person’s experience. As development economist Amartya Sen writes, “The persons receiving education do, of course, benefit from it, but addition a general expansion of education and literacy in a region can facilitate social change and also help to enhance economic progress from which others too benefit.”

And his closing brings it all together:

Even a cursory understanding of the Georgetown Mission Statement supports this vision of OCW: it speaks of a “serious and sustained discourse” among broad groups of disparate people by embodying “our commitment to justice and the common good, our intellectual openness, and our international character.” The tradition of Georgetown is in breaking boundaries and typifying academic excellence. OpenCourseWare reflects those words of Teilhard, speaking of removing ancient barriers and uniting across them. As a student who desires the best for both Georgetown and the global community of learners, I hope this goal is realized and the sentiment of Teilhard’s words recognized.

It’s really quite an elegant pitch for a student to make, but it has its lessons for everyone. If you are pitching OCW to your institution, you owe it to yourself to read this proposal.

From MIT:�

Two free courses published on MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) site have each received more than one million total visits since publication. The OCW site was launched by MIT in 2002, and the two courses, 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics and 18.06 Linear Algebra, were among the first courses made available.

Both courses have averaged roughly 600 visits per day from learners and educators around the world, making them the most visited courses on the OCW site. Professor Walter Lewin, who teaches 8.01, and Professor Gilbert Strang, who teaches 18.06, have both become web celebrities because of the video lectures and other course materials they have shared through OCW.

Read the rest of the press release here.

Image via Wikipedia

A simple observation, but one I’ve been bumping into all kinds of ways lately.

In the traditional division of courses into Content, Interaction, and Assessment, lectures are part of that block of “interaction”. And that’s why, for example, when noodling around with how to put OCW onto a platform like WordPress, it seems normal to have the readings as “Pages” (e.g. static content), and the lectures as “Posts” (e.g. interaction). A lecture, even when delivered from a typed sheet, is well contextualized — given in a specific context to a specific set of people. That’s weak interaction, but interaction nonetheless.

That’s why video lectures are fascinating — because they are treated more like content. Students watch them at warp speed, and even those of us who don’t hit the double-time button hop around, skip ahead, jump back, and review.

There’s a couple approaches to this. One is to let lectures slide into contentdom. As interaction, they were pretty thin gruel anyway — we can build that portion of the course on better ground. Another is to return to the event-based model, using a tool like the one that Tony Hirst has designed that autoposts lectures on a certain schedule, to provide that feel of interaction.

I’m interested in both. Some of my most treasured educational memories are of moving as a cohort with a good group of students through a class week by week, continuing the discussion where a professor’s lecture had been the first volley. That format, of time and context sensitive exposition followed by discussion is far from dead — indeed, it’s the very format that has made the blog a successful medium in areas where a fourm + content model has failed. My answer to the question, were I forced to answer today would be this — video lectures are content that we’re trying to get the interaction back into, via adding timing or surrounding social networks….

But that’s my thought on it today — I’m interested in what the rest of you think.

From the incomparable Jane Park at Creative Commons:

Last week, a bill enabling the California Community Colleges to integrate open educational resources (OER) into its core curriculum was signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger. AB 2261 authorizes the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges “to establish a pilot program to provide faculty and staff from community college districts around the state with the information, methods, and instructional materials to establish open education resources centers.”

From the quotes on the bill, it looks like the initial efforts may be largely focussed on addressing the high price of textbooks. But it’s certainly interesting to contemplate where this may lead…

I’m probably the last person to this party, but I just read David Wiley’s 2005-2012: The OpenCourseWars (including the deleted scenes) and it’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long time, not just on opencourseware but on open ed in general.

It’s not just the format (it’s written as a history written from the perspective of David speaking from the 2040s). And it’s not just the sense Wiley gives of the force of history being so much more powerful than what we design or promote — although it’s refreshing to see a narrative that admits our historical position is not as plotted as we’d like it to be — we try to design the future but are often left lighting sparks and hoping the right things burn.

But the thing that really resonated with me was the whole “trib” culture aspect. This has been a particular interest of mine for a while — and of course what the end of the narrative looks like to me is futuristic edupunk (would that be cyber-edupunk?).

It’s true we are at a historical moment where we really have to focus on the nuts and bolts of bringing more institutions into this movement. The creation of an initial critical mass of sharable, hackable content will be key to realizing the future culture David describes — even if that culture is destined to move beyond us.

So we shouldn’t lose our focus on that core goal — more and better OCWs. And for the moment, the focus should be on more — that’s just where we are.

But to my mind, there are a number of things we can look at even now as we progress. Are we blocking contribution from students in the way we design our OCWs? I’m not talking about building new tools — but reviewing how well our courseware plays with the third-party tools students can use to hack their own solutions. Do we supply RSS? Does our video play well with annotation tools? Social bookmarking tools? Can our course be spidered? Are the materials built for modification as well as presentation? Do our materials allow deep-linking? In short, are we hackable?

As David puts it:

But to answer the specific question, if I could go back in time and give one bit of specific advice to those early open education pioneers, it would be this: Embrace the trib culture. Embrace it as quickly and as fully as you can. Higher education does not have to remain a [read-only] endeavor. Open their eyes to what is happening all around you on YouTube, on Flickr, on Wikipedia, on Facebook, and evolve with the times rather than be left behind by them. The Industrial Age is over.