Archive for the 'open' Category

Bridging the gap between 2- and 4-year colleges

Published
by
Terri Bays
on October 8, 2008
in education, educational, oer, online, open, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and teaching
. 0 Comments

Great article by Jeffrey Brainard in the Nov. 10th Chronicle of Higher Education about collaborations which assist aspriring engineers as they make the transition between 2- and 4-year colleges. This type of collaboration strikes me as a great opportunity for OCW-providers. Brainard observes that:

the road leading a two-year engineering student to be a full-fledged engineer has proven to be rough because it travels through four-year degree programs. Universities’ requirements for transfer credits vary, sometimes in unpredictable ways, making admissions hard and forcing some students to repeat course work. Even a little additional time and expense can force some of those students, who are frequently from lower-income families, out of engineering altogether.

He goes on to report on efforts in California and Maryland to smooth the transition, including an agreement among schools in Maryland which defines:

analytical skills and areas of knowledge expected of prospective transfers. Participating two-year colleges would ask their governing board, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, to certify that their courses leading to an associate degree in engineering provide students with all of those “learning outcomes.” Participating four-year institutions would, in turn, agree to accept all of the credits earned by those graduates.

The movement towards defining “analytical skills and areas of knowledge” is where the opportunity arises for OCW-producing institutions. From the 2-year institution’s end, ocw publication allows the faculty to demonstrate that their courses foster the requisite skills and knowledge for successful transfer. From the 4-year institution’s end, ocw publication allows greater communication with prospective transfers, who can supplement their learning at a 2-year institution with materials from the 4-year institution to which they aspire. Since engineering students transferring from two-year colleges “perform quite well. . . earn[ing] better grades and graduat[ing] at slightly higher rates than those who started at the four-year institutions,” they ought to be worth recruiting, and what better way to convince them to enroll than to give them a taste of what they can expect to get from your institution? What we’d love to see is a situation where students could demonstrate independent acquisition of skills and knowledge for transfer or placement credit, further reducing the chance that time and expense will force worthy students out of professions where they are sorely needed.

Nor is there any reason this should apply only to engineering. Any number of professional fields are suffering from a shortage of skilled workers. Any number of communities are suffering from a shortage of affordable training opportunities. Schools who open up their course materials will attract and place better students. And we all will benefit from that.

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.

Newcomers’ Breakfast

Published
by
Terri Bays
on April 26, 2008
in creative commons, educational, licensing, ocw, ocw consortium, ocwc, oer, open, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware, presentations, remix and reuse
. 0 Comments

Below is a link to the slides from the Newcomers’ Breakfast we hosted just prior to the OCWC Meeting in Dalian. Please note that much of the detail drops out when you view them online, but it’s really there and can be viewed if you download the slides to your desktop (mental note: work out slideshare-friendly formatting for the future) . Much thanks to Tom Caswell, Meena Hwang and Clay Whipkey for their contributions as co-presenters!

http://www.slideshare.net/tbays/newcomers-breakfast

Terri

What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access?

Published
by
Garin Fons
on March 26, 2008
in copyright, licensing and open
. 0 Comments

Peter Suber Photo cc BY:2.5 (PatrickD)
Peter Suber Photo CC-BY (PatrickD)

Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College and Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), recently gave a talk at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society entitled: What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access? To learn more about ways universities can promote open access to research literature and, perhaps, use Suber’s arguments to promote open courseware initiatives at your university, visit the Berkman Center’s interactive page. You can also access slides of the event here.

OOPS! let me tell you our side of story.

Published
by
Lucifer Chu
on March 25, 2008
in education, ocw, ocw consortium, ocwc, oer, open, open educational resource and open educational resources
. 1 Comment

Well, this is my first article. Let me give you my “official introduction first”

Lucifer (Luc) Chu graduated from Taiwan’s National Central University in 1998 with a BS in electrical engineering. He is the founder of OOPS(Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System). He spends half of his time in Taiwan and half flying around the world to promote OOPS. He made a big mistake in high school while choosing his own name, so you can call him Luc if you like
(e-mail: Lucifer.chu@gmail.com; Website: www.myoops.org).

I am that long hair guy, and it’s one of OOPS university tour speech…:>

I’ll try to tell the story in several posts, cause I’m not that familiar with wordpress system…:>

 The date was June 13, 2007. The International Opencourseware and E-learning Conference was held in Taipei, Taiwan. The speakers who sat with the audience included guests from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University, the Open University of U.K.,Canada Research Council, Keio University of Japan,International Opencourseware Consortium and the National Institute of Multimedia Education of Japan. There were also over 600 participants from different parts of Taiwan. The organizer of this conference was OOPS’ founder, Lucifer Chu. He stood up, started to walk toward the stage for his 30-minute presentation. For any other speaker, this might only have taken 30 seconds, but for him, it took over 1,200 days and over hundreds of thousands of miles to get on the stage…….

these young people are OOPS volunteers, they are great!

Getting at the Essence of ‘Open’

Published
by
Garin Fons
on February 10, 2008
in ocw and open
. 0 Comments

In his latest Common Space post, Open vs. open vs. etc, telecentre.org Director Mark Surman mulls over a question that those of us involved in OCW projects might have some interest in: “why are so many people attracted to the word ‘open’?” A 30-minute thought experiment led Mark to create a chart comparing four common ‘domains of open’: open source software, open space meetings, open societies and open systems. In future iterations of the chart, Mark will compare other domains, including open content and open education. Have specific insight you feel might help Mark and others better understand the ‘meaning of open’? Send along your thoughts.

The Meme-ing of Open

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
. 1 Comment

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.

The Quest for Sustainability in OpenCourseWare

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on July 19, 2007
in educational, oer, open, opencourseware and resources
. 0 Comments

The quest for sustainability in open courseware

Created by Paul Trafford (University of Oxford) on July 15, 2007

I’ve been reflecting recently on the subject of open courseware and, more specifically, OpenCourseWare following the keynote for the Sakai conference in Amsterdam delivered confidently and enthusiastically by Hal Abelson (a podcast is available). In this post I’ll briefly recap some of the core aspects as I understand them and then go on to explore this area, based on personal experiences and ideas I’ve been formulating at Oxford.

Abelson took a broad view, inviting the audience to go back 25 years and defined programming as a “novel formal medium for expressing ideas.” Against that, he got us to consider the aspirations and expectations that we might have had then, encapsulating this in 3 predictions for 25 years thence (i.e. today):

  • a global encyclopaedia
  • TCP/IP global
  • collaborative educational resources

It’s the third that has yet to be properly delivered. Starting from consideration of why not, he then developed the rationale leading to the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative and the more recent Creative Commons Learn (ccLearn). Continue reading ‘The Quest for Sustainability in OpenCourseWare’

University of Southern Queensland OpenCourseWare

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on July 2, 2007
in education, ocw, oer, open, opencourseware and resources
. 0 Comments

The University of Southern Queensland in Australia has recently published a new OpenCourseWare site.

The content is quite remarkable. In addition — the entire OCW site is Moodle-based, which is encouraging as well.

Check it out if you get the chance!

Setting Learning Free

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on June 14, 2007
in education, ocw, oer, open and opencourseware
. 0 Comments

Information World Review

06/12/07 4:00 AM PT

Perhaps it is the global reach of the open courseware movement that offers the most radical challenge to the traditional localized method of delivering education. Some of the OpenCourseware Consortium’s members are experimenting with new models. Universia, for example, is a collaboration between a number of Spanish and Latin American universities, funded by the Bank of Santander.

In the late 1990s, when everybody wanted to take advantage of the moneymaking opportunities offered by the Internet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Latest News about Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided that it too wanted a slice of the action. MIT was, and still is, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Couldn’t it use some of the intellectual property it was creating on its campus to generate some additional revenue?

Continue reading ‘Setting Learning Free’