Archive for the 'course' Category

OER in the Fast Lane

Published
by
Garin Fons
 
on February 12, 2008
 
in course, education, ocw, oer, open educational resources and opencourseware
.

It’s all about Physics

Photo by mandj98 (CC BY:)

Who could have ever guessed that physics would play such a large role in drawing people toward open education resources? From the recent news story showcasing MIT Professor Walter Lewin and his highly entertaining Classical Physics video lectures to the featured Astrophysics course of Yale professor Charles Bailyn we can now add the work of University of Nebraska physics professor, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky. In today’s New York Times, Science Times article “Nascar’s Screech and Slam? It’s All Aerodynamics” John Tierney highlights Pelecky’s use of NASCAR and ‘the excitement of motorsports’ to get elementary and middle school students interested in science, math and engineering. If the thought of tailgating a car at 200mph has your middle schooler (or you) eager to learn more about computational fluid dynamics or static friction, then venture over to Pelecky’s website: Building SPEED (Science Participation: Education, Engagement and Diversity). The website, which is still in development, aims to create and share educational materials that use transportation as a way to teach the principles of the National Math and Science Education Standards. If physics professors can use NASCAR to attract people to open educational resources, I can’t wait to see the strategies educators might employ for, say, Media Studies.

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Open Teaching and Open CourseWare

Published
by
Timothy Vollmer
 
on February 5, 2008
 
in class, course, ocw, oer, online, open, open educational resources, opencourseware, public and teaching
.

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.

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