Archive for the 'ocw' Category

LINC 2010 - University Leadership: Bringing Technology-Enabled Education to Learners of All Ages

Published
by
Steve Carson
on December 16, 2009
in conferences, education, mit, ocw and open educational resource
. 0 Comments

I’m happy to share that MIT President Emeritus Charles Vest, who was MIT’s president at the inception of MIT OpenCourseWare, will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming LINC 2010 conference on MIT’s campus this May. This conference promises to be a great opportunity for global discussion of OCW and other technology-enabled education projects. Details included below.

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The Fifth International Conference of
MIT Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC)
May 23-26, 2010
University Leadership: Bringing
Technology-Enabled Education to Learners of All Ages
On the campus of MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts USA

MIT LINC is an international community of individuals and organizations that focuses on higher education in emerging countries and the role that technology can play in expanding educational reach. It is a collaboration of educators from around the world whose purpose is to share best practices and to learn from each other’s mistakes, in order to move forward with successful e-learning projects in their home countries.

With the 2010 theme, “University Leadership: Bringing Technology-Enabled Education to Learners of All Ages”, the consortium intends to showcase examples where universities are increasing usage of e-learning by reaching down to K-12 education or reaching up to lifelong learners. If technology-enabled education is to contribute to the social and economic development of emerging nations, it must move beyond the university to improve K-12 schooling and to create a culture of lifelong learning.

Plenary speakers include rectors of the leading virtual universities in Latin America, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The keynote plenary speaker is Dr. Charles M. Vest, President of the National Academy of Engineering and President-Emeritus of MIT. Other plenary speakers include educational leaders from business and government.

LINC 2010 participants will travel from all parts of the world as representatives of universities, government, corporations, foundations, K-12 education and lifelong learning initiatives. Each will come to share an international forum with others who understand the challenges faced by emerging nations in achieving the transformational potential of technology-enabled teaching and learning.  Innovative technologies and content will be presented and explored, along with the policies and pedagogies that make them successful. In the end, as with previous LINC conferences, valuable contacts will be made, strategic relationships developed and exciting educational collaborations begun.

More information available here.

eduCommons 3-2-1-Launch! Available Now

Published
by
Tom Caswell
on August 10, 2009
in ocw and opencourseware
. 1 Comment

I am pleased to announce the eduCommons 3.2.1-final release, available now for download at educommons.com. The past 8 months have been a transition period, as the eduCommons project has moved toward a sustainable, community supported model of development. This release includes numerous contributions from all over the world, including code contributions for OpenSearch support, OAI-pmh support, Selenium testing, and translations completed for Hindi, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, and Japanese, with 10 more languages in progress. English is also available.

And now for a shameless plug for my “Sustainability Happens” session at OpenEd 2009 in Vancouver on Friday. Brent Lambert and I will be sharing details of the new eduCommons release and stories about the vibrant community that has formed around this unique OCW software platform. Attend the session and get a free eduCommons 3.2.1 CD. Of course you can always just download it now. You don’t even need an activation key. I’ve included an updated feature list below. It’s been a great year for eduCommons and I have enjoyed my time as Project Manager. I look forward to seeing more good things come from such a great community.

Tom Caswell


Top 10 features in eduCommons 3.2.1-final:

1. Can you install it? Yes you can!

This release includes easy installers for Windows, RPMs for SUSE and CentOS5/RedHat5, and even a VMWare image. Plus simplified buildout installation scripts for all platforms makes getting up and running with eduCommons easier than ever.

2. WordPress Import/Export

You can send eduCommons course pages to your WordPress, and even import all your WordPress pages back into an eduCommons course. That’s something worth blogging about.

3. Publish site to static HTML

Too many users? Too many courses? Now you can publish your entire site to HTML and put it on your webserver or even a local hard drive. Everything loads nice and fast.

4. Global Find and Replace

This feature allows you to find and replace of text and HTML on an eduCommons site or any portion of it. Thanks to our friends at Novell for adding this component!

5. Common Cartridge, anyone?

Yes, eduCommons now supports IMS CommonCartridge importing and exporting to enhance interoperability of eduCommons courses. We even play nice with Blackboard, WebCT Vista, and Moodle.

6. More RSS. More Better.

eduCommons supports RSS for harvesters and humans too! View all the objects in a course, or just the 5 most recent ones.

7. Integration of OAI code and Open Search plugin

Thanks to our friends in Spain for adding these components!

8. Import/export of courses to/from Moodle

Now eduCommons allows users to import courses from Moodle backups and export them back to Moodle as well.

9. Tests are good!

Unit test coverage has been improved and a new Selenium acceptance testing framework has been added for additional confidence.

10. Community, and lots of it!

We’ve spent time dusting and cleaning the educommons.com site so you’ll feel like getting involved. We’ve got helpful support forums, development tracking, wikis, IRC chats, and the like. Come visit us at http://educommons.com!

OCW Finder, OER Recommender Future Directions Meeting

Published
by
Tom Caswell
on March 19, 2009
in news, ocw, oer and resources
. 0 Comments

Folksemantic is a project to create tools that increase the impact of open education resources by helping people find, filter, collaborate around, and remix them. As part of the project, work is underway to integrate the OCW Finder, OER Recommender, and Luvfoo. Plans are to improve these tools and add collaboration, personalized recommendation, widgets, and publishing features. COSL is holding an online meeting on March 26 to describe the Folksementic project and solicit input. See http://oerrecommender.org/mtg to learn more.

Working Session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at OCWC Global 2009

Published
by
Terri Bays
on March 19, 2009
in Fair Use, OCWC Conference, copyright, creative commons, education, educational, intellectual property, licensing, ocw, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and remix
. 2 Comments

You may have heard rumors that some of the US OCW producers have been working on a project to explore issues of Fair Use in Open Educational Resources.  Fair Use is the US version of a phenomena more generally known as Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, and most OCW projects have started out with the conservative assumption that they don’t get much fair use coverage.  Some lawyers are starting to say otherwise, however, so the Fair Use Working Group is gathering data about how OERs in the US are negotiating Fair Use.  The hope is to publish a Code of Best Practice for OER later in the year.

But the OCWC is a global consortium, so the Fair Use project is only one part of a larger initiative to explore the implications of Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (CELs) for OER’s.  We’ve started a wiki page for this larger initiative entitled Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, where you can see a conceptual map for the larger project as we see it so far.  You’ll also see a link to a draft page for gathering data about CELs in different legal jurisdictions.  Use the comment tabs on either page to share your ideas!  We’ll be hosting a working session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at the OCWC Global Meeting in Monterrey, Mexico next month, with Ahrash Bissell from CC Learn as our facilitator.  At the session we’ll discuss what additional data it would be useful to gather and walk through the data gathering process.

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
. 1 Comment

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

Corona of the Sun During a Solar Eclipse (No known copyright) (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

Stanford Engineering launches OCW site

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on September 17, 2008
in copyright, creative commons, news, ocw and ocw consortium
. 2 Comments

From the Creative Commons site:

Emulating MIT and a host of other OCW institutions, the Stanford School of Engineering has jumped on the OER bandwagon by releasing ten of its courses online in multiple formats. The pilot open courseware portal, known as Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), is Stanford’s first move towards offering full-length course videos and other materials online for free and open use. SEE’s current ten course offerings consist of “instruction videos, reading lists and materials and class assignments” in three subject areas: computer science, artificial intelligence, and linear systems and optimization.

All course materials are open for re-use under CC BY-NC-SA. The general site content on Stanford Engineering Everywhere is licensed CC BY.

Visit the Stanford Engineering Everywhere site.

Not Again!

Published
by
Terri Bays
on September 15, 2008
in copyright, creative commons, education, intellectual property, licensing, mit, ocw, open, opencourseware, press coverage, remix, reuse and sharealike
. 0 Comments

Very nice article by Noam Cohen in Sunday’s NYT about Connexions, an OCWC affiliate member and leader in the open textbook movement. Cohen starts with an account of R. Preston McAfee’s decision to allow free downloads of his economics textbook (or low-cost print-on-demand from Lulu and Flat World Knowledge) rather than with a traditional publishing house. McAfee is protesting both the high price of traditionally-published textbooks and their market-driven content.

The article then justly commends Connexions for its “broader effort” to allow users to “rip burn and mash” course material. I am cheering right along until Cohen uses the remix issue to contrast Connexions’ work with “other projects that share course materials, notably OpenCourseWare at M.I.T.“ Okay, so he’s not talking about most of us, and now we’re going to hear about the evils of .pdf, right? No. . . Cohen tells us that the big difference is that “Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited.”

Huh?

It’s admittedly a tough thing to explain in short space. And it’s even a tougher thing to make interesting to the average reader.

But this article gets it wrong, and I’m compelled to set the record straight once again.

What we have here is a mash up of concerns. Connexions does use the Creative Commons Attribution license, which is broader than than that used by MIT and many other OCW’s, on account of its not requiring either a non-commercial use or license compatibility. The Share-Alike clause is the point of concern, because can complicate the mixing of materials originally published under incompatible licenses (and here the non-commercial clause can come into play as well). But complication is not the same as prohibition, and we would do well not to let our internal disagreements over optimal licensing blur that fact, especially when we are addressing our potential users.

The fact is that OpenCourseWare projects, including those under the CC share-alike license, have had a lot of success on the reuse and redistribution front, as attested to the hundreds of courses that have been localized and translated around the world.

I do not want to downplay the legitimate concern that undue complication of the remix process might prevent its happening at all. We should and do engage in lively debate about what licenses will strike the right balance between the desires of producers and the convenience of users.

But it’s important to be clear on the essentials. The average reader of the NYT article surely walked away with an erroneous impression of what we do here. And to the extent that reader was a potential OCW adoptee, everybody loses.

University of Basque Country moves forward on OCW targets

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on September 14, 2008
in ocw, ocw consortium, ocwc and opencourseware
. 0 Comments

Last January, the University of Basque Country (also known as UPV/EHU) joined the Consortium, and they began to solicit OCW course proposals from faculty shortly after. They have already received 82 applications.

They’ve now announced their targets for next year. Twenty-three courses will be published by this December, followed by an additional twenty-two courses in the first quarter of 2009. By the close of 2009 they anticipate having 100 courses online.

Press Release (9/10/2008): Original Spanish version, or Google English Translation

Peru’s National University of Engineering joins Universia OCW

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on September 8, 2008
in ocw
. 0 Comments

Peru’s National University of Engineering has become the first university in Peru to make its courses available as OpenCourseWare. This project is a collaboration between the National University of Engineering and Universia. The project currently has nine courses up in the areas of economics and engineering.

Read Universia press release in original Spanish, or Google translation into English

Mike Caulfield — New Director of OCWC Community Outreach

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on July 24, 2008
in ocw, ocwc and opencourseware
. 0 Comments

I am very excited to announce the selection of Mike Caulfield as the new Director of OCWC Community Outreach. To read more about Mike and his enthusiasm for the position, click here.

You will be hearing more from Mike in the coming weeks and months, but for now, welcome, Mike!!!!