The recent dramatic events in Iran bring together numerous complicated issues including the political and cultural history of Iran and the Middle East, the role of women in culture and politics, and the impact of social media on world events. Courses throughout the OCW Consortium can be useful in providing context for the events surrounding the current election dispute. The following is a list I’ve pulled together, drawing heavily on the MIT catalog I am most familiar with. I encourage the OCW community to think of it as a starter list and to suggest additional resources.
Iranian History
21H.615 The Middle East in 20th Century (MIT)
Spring 2003
17.405 / 17.406 Seminar on Politics and Conflict in the Middle East (MIT)
Fall 2003
MELC 20040 - Islamic Societies of the Middle East and North Africa: Religion, History, and Culture
(Notre Dame)
Fall 2005
Democracy and Political Theory
21A.245J / 17.045J Power: Interpersonal, Organizational and Global Dimensions
Fall 2005
17.508 The Rise and Fall of Democracy/ Regime Change
Spring 2002
17.522 Politics and Religion
Fall 2006
21H.001 How to Stage a Revolution
Fall 2007
17.582 Civil War
Spring 2005
21A.225J / SP.621J / WGS.621J Violence, Human Rights, and Justice
Fall 2004
Women and Politics
17.905 Forms of Political Participation: Old and New
Spring 2005
New Media and Politics
CMS.998 / CMS.600 New Media Literacies
Spring 2007
Art 23AC Foundations of American Cyber-Culture
Fall 2007
21L.015 Introduction to Media Studies
Fall 2003
21A.348 Photography and Truth
Spring 2005
The OCWC Board of Directors is delighted to announce that Mary Lou Forward, of Brattleboro, Vermont, has accepted its offer of the OCWC Executive Director position. Mary Lou comes to us from SIT Study Abroad, where she has served as Academic Dean of African Studies since 2000. In that role, she provided academic and strategic leadership for 29 accredited undergraduate study abroad programs in Africa, leading SIT’s incorporation of technology and distance learning in international programming and developing innovative opportunities to collaborate across countries and between diverse student groups.
Prior to that, she served for six years as Academic Director for SIT’s Madagascar program, developing, revising and evaluating curricula for interdisciplinary undergraduate programs in Environmental Studies and Cultural Geography. Mary Lou has her BA in Psychology from Rutgers University (1988) her MA in International Administration from the School for International Training (1994) and is ABD in Environmental Studies. Although not formally joining the OCWC staff until July 15, Mary Lou will be consulting informally with the board and staff over the coming weeks.
As you may be aware, the position of Interim Executive Director has been filled for the past nine months by Terri Bays of Notre Dame. Terri will be stepping down on July 15th, but remaining with the Consortium on a part-time basis as Special Projects Manager to support Mary Lou as she settles in. The Consortium could not have succeeded as it has in the past year without Terri’s tireless efforts to move the organization forward.
Please join the members of the Board in welcoming Mary Lou and thanking Terri for her effort.
As you may be aware, the Consortium will be conducting a search in the next six to eight months for a new executive director.  I am chairing the search committee and am pleased to be joined by two other members of our board of directors, Yoshimi Fukuhara of Keio University/JOCW and Anka Mulder of TU Delft.
We would also like to include three members of the community at large on the search committee, and are inviting employees of member organizations to submit their names for consideration. Â Final selection of the three at-large members of the committee will be made by recommendation of Anka, Yoshimi and myself to the board of directors, and selections will be made to ensure a balance of perspectives from across the membership.
We look forward to rounding out our search committee and beginning the process of identifying a new executive director to propel the Consortium forward in the coming years. Â If you are interested in serving on the search committee, please send me an email at scarson@mit.edu.
It is with mixed emotion that I share that the OCW Consortium’s executive director of the past three years, John Dehlin, is taking the next step in his personal development and beginning prerequisite work for a PhD program. In order to concentrate on this study, John is stepping down as executive director. John has spoken to me often about his desire to further his own education, even while dedicating his time and skills to furthering the educational opportunities of countless others.
While I am immensely pleased for John to be able to take this next personal step, it comes at a loss to the Consortium. He has guided the organization though an important transition to independence, expanded the membership tremendously and provided a solid infrastructure to support the ongoing operation of the OCWC. Throughout his time as executive director he has also been a great collaborator and friend for me personally. John will continue to serve the Consortium in some capacity as he pursues his study.
The Consortium is fortunate to have Terri Bays of Notre Dame University available and willing to serve as interim executive director for the upcoming year, providing the Consortium the opportunity to conduct a thorough and orderly search for a new permanent executive director. As special projects manager, Terri has led the drafting of the Consortium’s bylaws and many other key steps in creating the new non-profit organization.
Please join me in thanking John for his contributions to the OCW movement to date and wishing him well in his new endeavors, and also in thanking Terri for taking on her new role in guiding the Consortium.
It’s been my pleasure to help Mike Caulfield get ramped up as the new Consortium Director of Community Outreach. Mike will be the primary point of contact for media, new members and OCWC Conference logistics–among many other things. Mike comes to us from Keene State College in New Hampshire, where he served as Director of Online Communications. Mike will be working out of his base in New Hampshire, and out of the MIT OpenCourseWare office as needed. Please help me welcome him to the community and look forward to meeting with him in Logan next month. He can be reached at caulfield dot mike at gmail dot com.
The Open University of Israel launched their OCW in March, with plans to publish course materials and more than 250 complete textbooks. Here is their announcement:
OCW at the Open University of Israel: free public access to on-line academic digital books and study materials
The Open University of Israel (OUI) is the largest university and academic publisher in Israel. With more than 40,000 students, it offers 650 courses in all major disciplines, and prints over a million copies of its textbooks annually. The university has a robust Hebrew-based home-grown LMS and it offers a rich variety of on-line learning models, including Web 2.0 applications. We use a hybrid (or blended) pedagogical model (Bonk, 2006) which combines distance a-synchronous tutoring with face-to-face sessions, some by video broadcasting to study centers and to students’ homes via their broadband web access.
In May 2008 the OUI launched the “Pe’er” OCW project (in Hebrew: “Opening Treasures of the Mind”, http://ocw.openu.ac.il/), with the intention to give free and open access to its learning materials and to a selected collection of its books. The project is was funded by the Rothchild Foundation and is conceptually similar to the OU-UK’s OpenLearn and to MIT’s OCW projects. The unique aspect of the OUI’s endeavor is the conversion of full titles from print to e-books and to audio books (in MP3 format). We began with 10 titles and will be opening more than 250 of our textbooks in 50 different courses to be freely available on-line. Many of the titles are supplemented by video lectures by the course designers or by other experts.
Additionally, the course core materials will be supplemented by reusable learning objects prepared by the teaching staff at OUI, like on-line quizzes, lecture summaries, presentations, dictionaries, and video-recordings of live sessions. The different items that will be made available to students and the to the general public, in the spirit of OCW. The Open University requires user registration in order to be able to assess public usage and user profiles. Our vision is to enable users to access OUI learning materials on mobile platforms and to add translated versions of the courses, initially in Arabic and Russian, for potential international audience.
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