Archive for June 2007

There’s no doubt that everyone in the open educational space is interested in maximizing the benefits of open educational resources to global educational systems, both formal and informal. At times, though, it seems this may be the only thing the community as a whole agrees upon. If you are interested in getting an inside look at the debates raging in the open educational resources community, there’s no better place than the forums that have been hosted by UNESCO’s IIEP.

In a field as rapidly and widely developing as open educational resources, vigorous debate is both expected and for the most part healthy. In particular, the forums have helped me to forge connections with people and projects I otherwise would not have known about. Of particular interest to me was the forum on what open education could learn from the open source software movement–this was the site of some of the more active exchanges, and the discussion provides an interesting looks at where community members do and do not see overlaps with the models of open source software.

Susan d’Antoni and the rest of the staff at IIEP deserve a great deal of appreciation for their efforts in facilitating these discussions.

One of the more interesting examples I’ve come across of emerging “educational networking” sites is Carmun.com. Carmun has many of the characteristics of the social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook–you can create a profile, store links, create groups, blog. Most attempts to create an educational networking site that I’ve seen take these elements, maybe a few other general tools, and try in one way or another to add an educational flavor to the site through design elements or through association with other educational sites.

Carmun, however, actually adds (or rather was built on) functionality designed for academic pursuits. Namely, it incorporates a bibliography management suite that allows you to organize and share your bibliographical references. Within the community, this aids in the discovery of both source materials related to topics you are studying and in the discovery of other community members reading the same texts you are reading. The only similar project I’ve come across is the Berkman Center’s H2O Playlist project. Carmun is just getting under way, but is an interesting entry into the space.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has been a pioneer in supporting open educational resources (OER) projects, recently announced new support for a number of initiatives, including $1 M over two years to support the OpenCourseWare Consortium. The Consortium has now grown to include around 150 institutions from around the world, and materials from more than 4,200 courses in nine different languages are available through the OCWC portal site.

Other open educational resources projects receiving funding from the Hewlett Foundation this year include the Development Gateway Foundation, projects at Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, WGBH, ISKME’s OER Commons, and Yale University’s Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project.

Open Vault is one of my favorite new additions to the the open content library. It represents the opening of a vast resource of clips from Boston’s flagship public television station, WGBH. Simply making this material freely available is a service in itself–it runs the gamut from recordings of poets reading their work to interviews of participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Civil Rights Movement.

WGBH, however, went above and beyond by offering the content in a site that is well-designed, easy to use, and offers a nice set of annotation tools to help you organize and tag the content. The videos can be browsed by topic, keyword search, and a visual navigation “mosaic,” all of which manage to be complementary rather than confusing. I sincerely hope that WGBH will inspire other public broadcasters to begin opening up their back catalogs as well.

The Hindu’s coverage of UNESCO’s new “Model Curricula for Journalism Education for Developing Countries and Emerging Democracies” highlights some of the potential pitfalls of open educational resources. The curricula is put forward as a general framework specifically intended to be adapted for local conditions in developing countries.

UNESCO‘s ‘Model Curricula for Journalism Education for Developing Countries and Emerging Democracies’ is a “valuable work in progress,” and it reflects the “universal principles revolving around freedom of expression.” Commending the Model Curricula in this perspective, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu N. Ram, said at a media conference here on Tuesday that there was no cause for “worry” that the UNESCO project might have been designed to create cultural homogeneity across the world.

Openly shared educational resources are occasionally subjected to colonial critiques even when not making explicit claims to be models or represent universal principles. UNESCO is as well-positioned as any organization to put forward curriculum as a model in this way, but it remains to be seen how well it will be received by potential users of these materials.

Apple recently made public its iTunes U site, accessible through the iTunes Store. iTunes U provides easy access to audio and video content from 16 different universities, including Standford, Duke and MIT. iTunes U is an interesting example of non-profit/for-profit partnerships emerging in the open education space. Early on open education projects, and OpenCourseWares in particular, were largely supported by foundation grants. In recent years, however, open education projects have been attracting audiences large enough to catch the interest of for profit companies in an number of ways.

While the details of the collaborations are not public, the iTunes U initiative demonstrates how such collaborations can both build audience for the participating open educational projects, and help Apple generate unique value for iPod users. It further leaves the partners to concentrate on what they do best: For the schools, develop high-quality open resources; for Apple, make those resources completely seamless to use. I’m expecting to see more non-profit/for-profit partnerships emerging in the coming years, as open education projects strive to become sustainable and companies begin to find business models to build around open educational resources along the lines of Red Hat and IBM’s relationships to open source software.

The library section of OEDb has compiled a pretty nifty list of their 236 favorite open courseware collections. Not only are these collections very high quality educational resources, they’re also all free. The list is broken up into categories such as eBooks, courseware, podcasts, and videos. And since the list is so extensive, almost everyone is sure to find something of interest there.