Monthly Archive for July, 2009

The OCWC Webinar Series

Published
by
Meena Hwang
on July 23, 2009
in ocwc and opencourseware
. 2 Comments

If you are new to the community or if you are contemplating starting an OCW project within your organization and want to learn more about it, attend our Webinar! If you are an experienced OCW project manager, then participate in the discussion and share your insight with the rest of us. Each month, we have an expert in various fields of OER projects giving a 20-minute-talk. We will follow with an informal discussion on the subject. We hope that sharing the expertise and facilitating more discussion within the community will strengthen our projects and activities.
The schedule for webinars is as follows:

8/6     The New eduCommons (Tom Caswell, OCWC)
Sept.  Student generated contents in OCW (Garin Fons, University of Michigan)
Oct.    Activities of Opencast (Mara Hancock, UC Berkeley)
Nov.   Issues in Intellectual Property (Terri Bays, OCWC)

All webinars are held at 10AM (GMT-5). Please register at www.ocwconsortium.org. Please hurry as positions are limited. Hope to see you there!

Current Events in Context: H1N1

Published
by
Steve Carson
on July 20, 2009
in current events, ocw consortium and opencourseware
. 0 Comments

There’s been a lot of speculation about how the H1N1 virus will spread in the upcoming flu season, and how virulent it will be. For a better understanding of the science behind epidemics, what we might expect this fall and how medical systems cope with outbreaks of disease, I’ve pulled together this list of starter resources from Consortium member sites.  Same caveats as last time, though this topic lends itself to a less MIT-centric list.  Please suggest additions if I have missed something on your school’s site.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:
Impact of Pandemic Influenza on Public Health
550.694.81 Fundamentals of Epidemiology I
340.627.81  Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases

MIT:
6.891 Computational Evolutionary Biology
7.340 Under the Radar Screen: How Bugs Trick Our Immune Defenses

University of Nottingham:
Flu pandemic : how prepared are we?

TU Delft:
Public hygiene and epidemiology (CT5420)

Tufts University:
233 Population Health, Spring 2007

eduCommons 3.2.1-RC1 Released

Published
by
Tom Caswell
on July 17, 2009
in ocwc, open, open educational resources and opencourseware
. 1 Comment

We are pleased to announce the first eduCommons 3.2.1 Release Candidate, now available as a Windows download. This version contains many innovative features, including the following:

•    eduCommons can now import from IMS Common Cartridge, IMS Content Package, MIT course downloads, Blackboard IMS, WebCT Vista, WebCT 6.1/7.0, and Moodle Backups
•    eduCommons can now export to IMS Common Cartridge, IMS Content Package, and IMS Package for Moodle
•    WordPress exports for eduCommons content
•    Publish eduCommons site to static HTML
•    Additional RSS added to view most recent items
•    Support added for additional metadata in rdf/rss views as well as OAI/pmh

We would love to get feedback from the rest of the OpenCourseWare community, and we extend a special invitation to all those interested in joining in testing and localization efforts for this project. Please report bugs and other feedback directly to Tom Caswell, eduCommons Project Manager.

If you are interested in translating eduCommons into your language, please contact Tom Caswell at caswell [dot] tom [at] educommons [dot] com. A final version of eduCommons will be available soon as a production-ready release

NOTE: We just updated an issue with eduCommons installers on SourceForge. Everything should be working now. http://educommons.com/downloads/educommons/releases/3.2.1

Say hello to Mary Lou!

Published
by
Meena Hwang
on July 16, 2009
in opencourseware
. 0 Comments

Mary Lou spent almost all her entire professional career in international education, with the past 15 years focused on Africa. She lived in Madagascar for six years before she took her position as the Dean of African Studies for SIT Study Abroad. Experiences in working with a global network of knowledge producers and directing collaborative projects engaging students from many different countries gave her conviction that OCW is a movement which is truly a global endeavor, with the ability to cross cultures and national boundaries to reach people in different situations and locations.

She sees OCWC as the facilitator of the global OCW community. The OCWC needs to nurture and grow the membership to increase the impact of the movement and the realization of its vision. This will require excellence in member services, communications, outreach, and technical support to allow members to create sustainable OCW projects that meet their own goals. As ED, Mary Lou’s main task would be to execute the Consortium’s Strategic Plan that was adopted by the Board of Directors at the Annual Meeting in April. This includes identifying and implementing strategies, keeping one eye on the horizon and one on the immediate future.

Mary Lou’s official first day was yesterday, but she had been communicating closely with Terri and Steve in the past couple weeks which let her have a fully-charged and exciting first day. She had a meeting with JISC to talk about the OER and OCW movements in the UK, and she worked on editing the business plan for the coming year. She looks forward to working closely with all the contributors of the Consortium to make this compelling and ground-breaking work gain long-term sustainability and impact. And I am sure that I speak for all of us at the Consortium when I say that we are delighted to have such talent and expertise with us. Again, welcome, Mary Lou!

Thank you, and Welcome!

Published
by
Meena Hwang
on July 15, 2009
in opencourseware
. 0 Comments

Today was the last day for Terri as the Interim Executive Director. She came on board at a time when the Consortium needed to establish itself as an organization ready to take on its mission in a sustainable and scalable way. The Consortium’s membership grew by 30% in the ten months that Terri was serving as the Interim Executive Director, and I know that many of these new members know of Terri as the person with all the answers. We can only imagine how difficult it is to manage an organization that is rapidly growing and is as diverse as the Consortium. Terri also worked on the toolkit to provide new and prospective members with readily usable guidelines for an OCW project. If you are thinking that you will miss Terri so terribly, don’t worry. She will stay with the Consortium on a part time basis as Special Projects Manager. As Terri puts it, we are not “getting rid of her that easily.” And I am so grateful for that. Nonetheless, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Terri for all the outstanding work, enthusiasm, and support she has shown while serving as the Interim Executive Director.

Today was Mary Lou Forward’s first official day as the new Executive Director. Since her profile had already been introduced to the community(see the post below by Steve), I thought that I would let you guys know about what her first day as the Executive Director was like and introduce her to the community that way. I will fill you guys in tomorrow with all the exciting details as Mary Lou had a very busy day today filled with meetings and reports. As many of you already know, Mary Lou brings to the Consortium extensive experience in education and technology in multicultural environment. Please join me in welcoming Mary Lou to the Consortium. Welcome, Mary Lou!

$50 million for the development of open online courses for community colleges

Published
by
Meena Hwang
on July 15, 2009
in opencourseware
. 0 Comments

On the 14th of July at Macomb Community College in Michigan, President Obama announced the proposal to commit $50 million to develop open online courses for community colleges. This is a part of the American Graduation Initiative which aims at five million additional graduates in the next decade in order to equip the American workforce with a competitive edge in the global economy.

The fact that OER was recognized as an integral part of strengthening education of community colleges makes this announcement a monumental one, especially to those of us who everyday contemplate ways to create more quality course contents carrying Creative Commons license to be used and adopted for free.

The White House Announcement

The American Graduation Initiative Factsheet

AASL names MIT’s Highlights for High School to top web site list

Published
by
Steve Carson
on July 13, 2009
in opencourseware
. 0 Comments

Highlights recognized as valuable free resource for secondary educators and students

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 12 - MIT’s Highlights for High School site (http://ocw.mit.edu/highschool) has been recognized as a Landmark Website for Teaching and Learning by the American Association of School Librarians.  An outgrowth of MIT’s renown OpenCourseWare program, Highlights for High School features more than 2,600 video and audio clips, animations, lecture notes and assignments taken from actual MIT courses, and categorizes them to match the Advanced Placement physics, biology and calculus curricula. Demonstrations, simulations, and animations give educators engaging ways to present STEM concepts, while videos illustrate MIT’s hands-on approach to the teaching of these subjects.

MIT President Susan Hockfield described the Institute’s motivation for the program at its November 2007 launch. “Strength in K-12 math and science will be increasingly important for America if the nation is to continue to lead in today’s innovation economy,” said MIT President Hockfield. “Highlights for High School will provide students and teachers with innovative tools to supplement their math and science studies.  We hope it will inspire students to reach beyond their required classwork to explore more advanced material and might also encourage them to pursue careers in science and engineering.”

The AASL’s Best Websites for Teaching and Learning program honors websites, tools, and resources of exceptional value to inquiry-based teaching and learning as embodied in the American Association of School Librarians’ Standards for the 21st-Century Learner.  The Landmark Websites are honored due to their exemplary histories of authoritative, dynamic content and curricular relevance. They are free, web-based sites that are user-friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover and provide a foundation to support 21st-century teaching and learning. Read more at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/aboutaasl/bestlist/bestwebsiteslandmark.cfm

Since its launch, the Highlights for High School site has received more than 700,000 visits.  Surveys indicate that visitors include high school educators (34%), high school students (15.5%),  and parents of high schoolers (13%).  In using the site, educators most often integrate Highlights for High School into classroom instruction, increase their knowledge of a specific subject matter, and learn new methods of teaching. Students use the site to help them study for tests and to learn for personal knowledge.

MIT has a long history of support for secondary and elementary education, with successful prior national efforts.  For example, the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) formed in 1956 by a group of university physics professors and high school physics teachers, and led by MIT’s Jerrold Zacharias and Francis Friedman developed new pedagogies for the teaching of introductory courses in physics. MIT also has over 40 successful current K-12 programs and initiatives addressing science and engineering preparation at a local and national level.

The MIT OpenCourseWare site (http://ocw.mit.edu), from which Highlights for High School draws content, contains the core academic materials for more than 1,900 of MIT’s courses, voluntarily provided by MIT faculty under an open license that allows site users to download and modify the materials for noncommercial use. The site contains notes from more than 1,500 lectures, 9,000 assignments, and 900 exams. Many courses include enhanced multimedia content, including 32 that contain complete video recordings of course lectures.

For more information, please contact:

Stephen Carson
External Relations Director
MIT OpenCourseWare
(617) 253-1250
ocw-outreach@mit.edu