Archive for August 2007

Here’s a great summary of articles posted in the not-too-distant past in Terra Incognita addressing the relationship between open source software and open educational resources. Here is the abstract of the summary:

In March 2007, a group of authors wrote short articles about the impact of Open Educational Resources and Open Source Software on education and engaged in dialog on the topic. The articles were posted on Terra Incognita. Several themes surfaced from the 11 articles, which included the roles of common-based peer production as an emerging economic and social model, organizational enablers and challenges, the critical nature of localization for reuse, and Learning Design as a form of Open Source Teaching.

Here’s an article that suggests college students should think more about finances on the way into college instead of waiting until graduation. It also refers to one of the OpenCourseWare resources I’ve taken advantage of, UC Irvine’s Personal Financial Planning course, as well as a number of other useful resources.

Feeling unprepared for the new semester? Here’s 10 ways you can use OCW to stay ahead of in the game in the upcomming school year:

1 ) Beef up your study skills - OCW sites offer a number of study skills courses, including this one from the University of Southern Queensland.

2 ) Pick that major - Yes you probably could get all the way through school undeclared, but OCW can help take the guesswork out of deciding what you really want to study. Courseware available through the OCW Consortium site can give you insight into what is actually studied in advanced courses for a wide range of majors.

3 ) Brush up on last year - Use the Consortium site to locate classes similar to those you took last year and convince this year’s professors that you actually remembered some of it.

4 ) Sharpen your writing skills - MIT OCW’s Rhetoric class is a great way to remind yourself of the basics of good expository writing, a skill that never goes out of style.

5 ) Compare notes – Not quite getting the discussion of polymers in your class? Go to OU UK’s OpenLearn for another explanation of the topic that might be more your style.

6 ) Make up missed lectures - Sleep though that early morning Chemistry lecture? Video and audio lectures like those offered by UC Berkeley can fill in the gaps.

7 ) Get that extra practice – Big test in that Economics course coming up? Many OCW sites, such as this Applicaitons of Game Theory course from MIT, contain a library of exams from past years and often include solutions. Others contain extensive lists of problem sets.

8 ) Flash back - In that upper level course you suddenly realize you really do need to use that inverse trigonomic function you didn’t quite learn last year. Fortunately, lecture notes like those on University of Tokyo’s site can help you go back in time.

9 ) Flash forward - Not getting why you need to know economics to design aircraft? Check out lectures on cost analysis for Aerospace Engineering.

10 ) Study cool stuff - Getting bored with the topics you’ve signed up for? Study Kitchen Chemistry, Avalanche and Snow Dynamics, Tropical Ecology and Conservation, or anything else that catches you eye, no registration required.

Here’s a useful site for anyone trying to better understand global usage of an open educaitonal resource. The site feels a little cheesy, but the underlying stats are from the ITU and Nielsen, as well as other reliable sources, and the information is organized for easy access.

University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre is announcing its upcoming online symposium, Copyright/Copyleft: Issues for Education, on September 24th. This is a discussion that will include many particulars from the Canadian context, and should also be quite useful to those interested in more general copyleft issues as well. Unfortunately for me, this coincides with the upcoming OpenCourseWare Consortium meeting just prior to the Open Education 2007 conference, but I’ll try to check in once or twice and see what’s under discussion. (via elearnspace)

David Wiley recently announced COSL’s release of OER Recommender, a Firefox plug-in that inserts recommendations for related open educational resources into the one you are viewing. It’s easy to install (though I did manage to get lost once in the three steps), and right now, OER Recommender (apparently) indexes about 20 OER repositories, including MIT OpenCourseWare.

What’s not revealed by any information I could locate is how the recommendations are generated, but my guess is some sort of automated RSS keyword matching. I’m guessing this because there are recommendations across the entire MIT OCW publication, something not easily done manually. This is important to know, as it provides some context for what you’re looking at. The recommendations aren’t, for instance, the recommendations of other educators or students (though I’m sure COSL has it’s eye on such a system of recommendations as well) but rather a high level these-two-thing-have some-sort-of-relationship-so-you-might-want-to-take-a-peek. I’m looking forward to playing with it a little more to see what it points out.

I’m losing track of the version numbers… Anyway, while we’re gazing into crystal balls today, here is another look at what the future of education may hold, this one from Markz Space. I agree here with the assertion that much of the change in education, whatever it actually turns out to be, may occur in developing regions where educational systems are under more stress and have less inertia.

…is when established interests threatened by disruptive innovations marshal resources to lobby against change. Here, Open Access News covers the recent launch of a lobbying group to protect traditional journal publishing models.

This is a great clip exploring a possible future for education as Epic 2014 did for news and media. It explores some interesting directions, and certainly doesn’t underestimate the pace of technological change. I am a little more skeptical about cultural change occurring at the pace that this piece predicts.

This is three of a three part series sketching out some parameters for what OpenCourseWare is all about. It’s meant to orient new users of open content. Here are parts one and two.

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Given the variety of audience uses, a question that arises as schools consider OCW publication is inevitably “How much is enough?” Intellectual property concerns, faculty and institution preferences and publishing level of effort generaly dictate that only a subset of the materials used in a given class will be published via an OCW site. How much, then, is enough to provide significant value to end users?

This answer differs from project to project, often based on the audience that is of most interest to the publishing institution. For a school interested in supporting independent learning, a more complete set of materials is required. For a school interested in providing resources for educators and enrolled students, often less material from a course is still very useful, especially if this permits materials from more courses in total to be published, providing a broader view of curricular structures. The trade off here is almost always depth vs. breadth.

For MIT OpenCourseWare, the minimum standard for publication [ PDF ] has been that three types of materials must be included in a published course:

• Planning materials - typically a syllabus and calendar
• Subject matter materials - most often lecture notes and reading lists; these aren’t always enough to fully convey the subject matter, but provide enough information that at minimum users can access subject matter though an academic library
• Learning activities materials - At least one example of tests, homework assignments, projects or labs

With these three materials present, the hope is that there is at least some sort of replicable learning experience presented. Many courses go well beyond this minimum, including full video lectures, etc. Other programs include more content per course. UC Irvine, for instance, provides a full set of distance learning materials for each course.

This is two of a three part series sketching out some parameters for what OpenCourseWare is all about. It’s meant to orient new users of open content. Here are parts one and three.

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When MIT launched the OCW project, there was no clear idea who might benefit from the materials, but there was the shared intuition among the faculty who proposed the project that many would. Initially it was widely expected that OCW would largely be a resource for faculty at other institutions to use in developing their own courses. Students at other institutions might, it was thought, use the materials as well to help with the classes they were taking. Finally, there were probably going to be a few professionals who could make use of the materials, but the project wasn’t designed as distance learning, so this was expected to be a small part of the overall use.

MIT OpenCourseWare’s evaluations [ PDF 9 MB ] over the years have shown that in fact most of the site usage comes from independent learners (50%), followed by students (30%) and educators (15%). These numbers indicate that faculty do come to the site in disproportionate numbers (higher ed instructors are 0.4% of the US population and 10% of the US OCW audience), but the figures also demonstrate a significant and surprising level of independent learning supported by the site. Overall, OCW use has not been well studied, and there is much yet to learn about how the resource provides benefit, but at this point it’s a safe bet to say the materials are useful to a variety of audiences in a variety of ways.

This is one of a three part series sketching out some parameters for what OpenCourseWare is all about. It’s meant to orient new users of open content. Here are parts two and three.

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A look through the OpenCourseWare sites linked from the OpenCourseWare Consortium Use page will reveal many sites that look quite similar. The MIT OpenCourseWare site looks recognizably like the Waseda site, which looks reasonably like the Universidad de Navarra site, which is similar to the Novell site. Other sites are more of a departure. UC Irvine’s OCW, and the Open University UK’s site, for instance, depart in form and content from the others.

The OCW Consortium has collectively defined the term OpenCourseWare, and the definition is helpful in understanding the common thread between these different projects. At least in the Consortium’s view, OpenCourseWare is defined as the following:

An OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials organized as courses.

It’s probably helpful to unpack this definition a bit. The key components are:

• Free and open - this requires, at for purposes of the Consortium, that the materials be licensed for redistribution, reuse and modification. This is most frequently done via a Creative Commons License.
• High quality - one of the challenges of open education publication is quality assurance. Because OCW materials are published by universities and other organizations under their own name, they carry a level of built-in quality indication that helps reduce the need for complex rating and peer review systems.
• Course materials - typically (though not always) materials actually used for credit-bearing instruction at the publishing university.
• Organized as courses - reflecting the academic structure of the courses and often programs from which the materials are drawn. This is often spoken of as “content in context.”

These are the common elements shared by OCW projects. Projects such as OpenLearn build additional components on top of this common framework, including interactive support elements that allow for more feedback and interaction around the content.

In addition to ICT’s making the world a smaller place, they are also making it a much more accurately and availably mapped place, and the geospatial data now available is being combined with all kinds of other data to reveal the world in new ways. Open Access News is carrying this bit on recent developments in open geospatial data, and Sramana Mitra has been carrying this related series as well. I’m not aware of any open education projects using this data, but I’m sure some are out there and more are on the way.

As summer winds down, I find myself thinking about the program I participated in this time last summer, the Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University. This program focuses on social entrepreneurship, which is essentially the development of sound business models intended to generate social benefit as opposed to (or in addition to) financial gain. I was fortunate to participate in the program along with about 20 other representatives of incredibly inspiring programs from around the world. The program was very influential in my thinking about sustainability for open education projects. My only regret is that their courseware is not openly available, as there are a great many more who could benefit from access to the materials.

The issues faced by open science efforts such as Science Commons are some of the most complex in the open education arena. This article in University Affairs is a nice overview:

…an international scientific counterculture is emerging. Often referred to as “open science,” this growing movement proposes that we err on the side of collaboration and sharing. That’s especially true when it comes to creating and using the basic scientific tools needed both for downstream innovation and for solving broader human problems.

(via Open Access News)

I’ve just finished Charles Vest’s The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web. Vest was president of MIT when OpenCourseWare was proposed, and has been one of the strongest proponents of the project and the concept. The American Research University (published under full copyright by the U of C Press) is based on speeches given by Vest as the 2005 Clark Kerr Lecturer on the Role of Higher Education in Society.

Vest was president of MIT for thirteen years, an extraordinarily long tenure during which he witnessed extraordinary changes in how universities do business, and this book is filled with observations that can help emerging leaders of open education projects understand the pressures faced by senior leadership at universities. The book contains four chapters covering the relationship between universities and government, universities and philanthropies, universities and terrorism, and finally universities and openness. While the last is the most directly on the topic of openness (it recounts the development of MIT OCW), the others are probably as relevant, especially given that nearly all open education projects have sustainability issues, and because opening knowledge is both more challenging and important in a post 9/11 world. Very much worth the read.

I haven’t yet written here about the One Laptop Per Child project, or the “$100 laptop” as it is more widely known. The project seeks to provide a laptop designed for use in developing regions to every child on the planet:

Any nation’s most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children’s innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children’s machine designed for “learning learning.”

The laptop itself is an infectiously enchanting machine for adults and children alike. But the project knows full well that hardware itself is not enough. For this reason, they are kicking off their Summer of Content:

The Summer of Content (SoCon) program offers budding creators mentorship and stipends to develop open content and run free culture events throughout the world. Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code program, our goal is to support a self-sustaining ecosystem of open content by encouraging growth of contributor communities, and attention to communication and accessibility around projects, where they’re most needed.

A lot of criticisms, fair and unfair, have been made of the project, but having seen the laptop in action and seeing this level of commitment to content, I suspect the project will be causing controversy for years to come.

This is a site worth bookmarking. A directory of over 2,800 open access jounals in the following fields:

• Agriculture and Food Sciences
• Arts and Architecture
• Biology and Life Sciences
• Business and Economics
• Chemistry
• Earth and Environmental Sciences
• General Works
• Health Sciences
• History and Archaeology
• Languages and Literatures
• Law and Political Science
• Mathematics and Statistics
• Philosophy and Religion
• Physics and Astronomy
• Science General
• Social Sciences
• Technology and Engineering

In total, the site includes more than 140,000 articles.  I’ve said this before, but as the corpus of OA articles and the prestige of OA journals increases, and as the volume of OpenCourseWare increases, an index to cross-reference the two automatically will be an important way for each to leverage the other.

IPKat gives its take on the new WIPO Guide on Managing Intellectual Property For Museums.  WIPO, as you can learn more about in this report, is the UN body that coordinates international IP agreements (although much of the real action is in WTO trade negotiations).  WIPO is viewed by many as representing the interests of major western copyright-dependent industries.  Don’t miss links at the end of the IPKat post.

Interesting data from the National School Board Association on student social and educational networking.  While much of the activity still revolves around socializing and exchange of digital media, over half indicate they discuss education-related topics. This is the next generation of students who will be using open educational resources, and online networking tools are clearly already woven into the fabric of their learning lives.  Get the full report here [ PDF ].

(via Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day)