Students from the School of Information at the University of Michigan have been learning about the OCW publishing process and are working on piloting a course themselves. These digital scribes–”dScribes”– have chosen an interesting course they are currently enrolled in and are beginning to navigate the ins and outs of the OCW workflow. The students have been working with mentors from the OCW team, and eventually the course will be published on the Michigan OCW site. Here’s photos from the weekly dScribe workshop. This week’s topic–intellectual property (go figure!).
Here’s some basic information about the dScribe framework:
It’s been reported numerous places that United Nations University has ramped up their OpenCourseWare project. An interesting aspect of the UNU OCW initiative has been the release of course materials under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The majority of other OCW projects have chosen to publish their materials under a version of the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. The debate about open licensing options continues (and hopefully will prompt more discussion here). While the CC-BY license is in essence more “free” from the get-go, it lacks the viral nature of the ShareAlike clause, which ensures that downstream remixes of content also remain free and open.
Full disclosure: I am a part time employee of Creative Commons, but do not endorse or recommend any specific CC license here or in any of these postings.
Check out The Web Difference, the class blog for John Palfrey and David Weinberger’s fantastic class at Harvard Law. The site is an interesting take on dynamic open education–the instructors utilize lots of open content and encourage students to participate in class discussions publicly via the blog.
This is not entirely new–Wiley’s been doing this with his online course Introduction to Open Education by maintaining a wiki with content and input from students around the world. Eventually the wiki content is ported to the OCW site. This semester Chuck Severance is maintaining his own flavor of OCW for his undergraduate Python course at the University of Michigan.
These projects demonstrate the evolving nature of open education. Not only will open coursewares continue to provide and support open content, but will also begin to explore a more open, transparent, and collaborative teaching pedagogy.
Recent Comments