Monthly Archive for January, 2009

A Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Courseware

Published
by
Garin Fons
on January 27, 2009
in Fair Use, copyright, education, hewlett, intellectual property, news, ocw and open educational resources
. 0 Comments

Corona of the Sun during a Solar Eclipse (No Known Copyright Restrictions)

Corona of the Sun During a Solar Eclipse (No known copyright)Â (from flickr commons: http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2534500722/)

A Note from the Fair Use on Open CourseWare team:

All of us have been frustrated by problems with third-party rights for open courseware materials. We know that if we could clarify when fair use applies, we could vastly expand the utility of what we do. And we know that in other cases, creative communities have done that. For instance, documentary filmmakers now find that insurers accept their claims of fair use, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. Similarly, media literacy teachers now can teach without fear, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. These codes of best practices were coordinated by Profs. Peter Jaszi and Pat Aufderheide, through the Center for Social Media and the Washington College of Law at American University.

We need a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware. A group of representatives at some of the open courseware universities—MIT, Tufts, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Yale, Notre Dame, Berkeley, Creative Commons—have started a project to do this, in coordination with Jaszi and Aufderheide, and with financial support from the Hewlett Foundation and from each of our universities. Each of the eight participating universities’ staff has set aside some part of their workload for this job.

Are you interested in helping to shape a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware? You can participate at several levels. If you would like to become a researcher on the project, just let Lindsey Weeramuni (lweera@mit.edu), the project’s coordinator know. Do you have a story to tell? Write Jaszi and Aufderheide at socialmedia@american.edu and we’ll connect you. Do you think your organization would eventually like to become a signatory? Let Lindsey know and we’ll be in touch when the document has been crafted, for your participation.

We hope to complete this work by September 1, so that the 2009-2010 school year can be a great one for open courseware.

Other questions or comments can also be directed here at open.michigan@umich.edu

Cathy Casserly to Join Carnegie OER

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on January 21, 2009
in opencourseware
. 1 Comment

From a press release we received last night:

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching today named Catherine M. Casserly as Senior Partner effective April 2009. Casserly was director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she managed grants to harness the power of the World Wide Web to equalize access to knowledge. Leading the strategic direction of this now worldwide movement, Casserly worked to raise global awareness of these educational resources and coordinate participants and their projects.

As the first full-time Senior Partner appointed by Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk, Casserly will be responsible for new program initiatives and will manage the strategic direction of Carnegie’s work in Open Educational Resources. In leading efforts to build a new field of Design, Educational Engineering and Development, Carnegie provides an ideal combination of timing and place to extend the knowledge and evidence base regarding the effectiveness of innovation and Open Educational Resources for learning.

We’ve been lucky to work with Cathy in her position at Hewlett, and we’re sad we’ll be seeing less of her, but we wish her the best of luck in her new job. Congratulations, Cathy!

Play With Our OPML. Seriously.

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on January 15, 2009
in opencourseware
. 2 Comments

We haven’t really promoted this widely, but we have an OPML file that contains a list of RSS feeds of institutions that publish catalog entries of their OCW courses to RSS.

Gibberish? Read no further. Code jockeys, on the other hand, follow me…

Here’s the link to the OPML:

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/feeds/ocwcmemberfeeds.opml

The entries in the OPML file represent institutional course feeds. Here’s a snippet:


<outline type="rss"Â title="University of Notre Dame" text="University of Notre Dame" url="http://ocw.nd.edu/courselist/rss"/>
<outline type="rss"Â title="United Nations University" text="United Nations University" url="http://ocw.unu.edu/rss_all"/>
<outline type="rss"Â title="Keio University" text="Keio University" url="http://ocw.dmc.keio.ac.jp/KeioOCW_rss20.xml"/>

Once you get down to the individual feeds, and pull, say the feed for Notre Dame, the format for items looks like this:


<item rdf:about="http://ocw.nd.edu/architecture/nature-and-the-built-environment-1">
<title>Nature and the Built Environment</title>
<link>http://ocw.nd.edu/architecture/nature-and-the-built-environment-1</link>
<description>This course explores the evolutionary roots of form and order in the built environment. While grounded in scientific evidence, a broad perspective of humanism is emphasized throughout, with discussions of how ideas, beliefs, experience, ideals, and human nature animate individuals and societies and thereby give form to the things they make. </description>
<cc:license rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/”/>
<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>
<rdf:bag>
<rdf:li>Nature and the Built Environment</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Art</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Nature</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Built Environment</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Ancient Greece</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Architecture</rdf:li>
</rdf:bag>
</dc:subject>
<dc:contributor>
<rdf:bag>
<rdf:li>Norman Crowe</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Paul Monson</rdf:li>
</rdf:bag>
</dc:contributor>
<dc:date>2008-11-24T18:28:17Z</dc:date>
<dc:type>Course</dc:type>
<dc:format>text/html</dc:format>
</item>

We don’t have entries for every OCW course (because we don’t have feeds for many institutions). Still if you drill down from that OPML into all the individual feeds, there’s something like 3,300 courses represented, complete with subject tags.

Maybe I’m crazy, but it seems like this is ripe for a mashup. Clay’s already written a wonderful OCW search application using these feeds. But I’m sure there are other opportunities. Maybe a bookmarklet, ala Library Lookup? Google home page widget? Heck, I don’t know. Half the point of openness is the people sitting on the data don’t have any idea of some of its potential applications, and you can count me in on that group.

I should note once again this is just the subset of institutions from which we’ve gotten feeds. But more applications means more incentive for people to submit feeds — so if you do something interesting with it, let us know.

OCWC Organizational Effectiveness Survey

Published
by
Terri Bays
on January 13, 2009
in ocw consortium, ocwc and opencourseware
. 0 Comments

This January, the OpenCourseWare Consortium is undergoing an organizational effectiveness review, and we need your input. We’re looking for ways to further develop an organization that best serves the needs of current and potential members while most effectively furthering the mission of the Consortium—to improve education and empower people worldwide through OpenCourseWare.

We’ve created four versions of a short survey: for current members (both educational institutions and affiliates), as well as for OER community members who are not currently members of the Consortium (again, one for educational institutions and one for other types of organizations).

Please take a few minutes by Friday, January 16 to visit

www.ocwconsortium.org/planningsurveys,

where you can find and complete the survey most appropriate for you. Even if you’re not interested in participating in Consortium activities, your input will help us better understand our role within the OER movement and will further the cause of widening educational opportunity around the world.

Thanks in advance!

Terri

Registration for OCWC Houston Regional [North and South America] Ends Monday!

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on January 9, 2009
in opencourseware
. 0 Comments

There will be late registration available, but normal registration for the OCWC Regional in Houston ends this coming Monday. We’ve set it up so that there are both Spanish and English presentations in each session, so please, whether you are in Manitoba or Argentina, consider coming to this regional event.

Conference is held February 5-6, with an optional event on the 7th.

Agenda is here: http://cnxconference.rice.edu/agenda.cfm

Registration is here: http://cnxconference.rice.edu/registration.cfm

The conference fee is $495 and includes meals. Rooms are available at reduced conference rates.

Please pass this on to someone you know who may be interested. The conference is open to everybody, regardless of whether they are an OCWC member or a Connexions participant, and will be useful to anyone interested in OER or OCW, novice to expert.

Taiwan OCWC (TOCWC) Launches, Provides Interesting Credit Option

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on January 5, 2009
in opencourseware
. 1 Comment

The launch of the Taiwan OCW Consortium (TOCWC) is getting some notice, most recently from the Taiwan News:

A group of local universities formed an alliance Wednesday to provide the public with free online access to some of their formal course materials in the hope that more people will make use of the country’s higher education resources.
Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Taiwan OpenCourseWare Consortium (TOCWC), Wu Chung-yu, president of the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), said the joint effort will help break space and time barriers to knowledge exchange and communication.

You can see the OCWC members from Taiwan here. There’s also a neat element to the implementation: it looks like at least some participating universities may treat self-study with TOCW as a sort of Advanced Placement:

Noting that the new service does not require registration, Pai added that as a general rule, no degrees or certifications are awarded and the courses are purely for people who are interested in the subjects and would like to educate themselves.

However, she said NCTU has made it an exception that if high school graduates who apply to enter the school can pass the September exam on the subject they have been self-learning when their freshman semester begins, they will be eligible to apply for advanced credit standing.

A small step toward a credit model — and certainly one that is easy to emulate.