OpenCourseWare ioe12

OpenCourseWare (OCW) is the provision of course materials provided openly on the Web and pioneered by MIT.

I recall the time of the MIT announcement as I worked in a Computing Services department of a UK university the Deputy Director at the time saying that MIT was putting all its courses online. I tried to make the distinction that it wasn’t their courses but their courseware that was being made public and that there was much more to a course than its content. Fundamentally, education is more that just content, it is the added value above and beyond the content; it is the interaction of students with faculty, with other students, with experts, with novices, anything that creates an intellectually challenging environment to challenge pre-existing beliefs. In the Openness in Education OpenCourseWare topic video, the announcement press conference (I’ve linked to the MIT hosted version) filmed at MIT (4 April 2001), MIT President Charles Vest makes this point quite distinctly in his opening speech, and again in response to questioning. Importantly for me and the work I’m currently involved in, Prof. Vest strongly points to the “deeply ingrained sense of service” and “incredible idealism” within the MIT faculty. This for me encapsulated the ethos of a deep sense of commitment to what education means to illustrious and highly motivated educations at one of the world’s great educational institutions. Prof. Steve Lerman (Chairman of the Faculty) says that selling courses for profit is not why most of the faculty do what they do, and it’s not the mission of the University. A fundamental value is how you create and disseminate human knowledge. Also, the fact that such an idea, and indeed a venture, could come seemingly from the grassroots faculty is extremely encouraging for me personally.

Prof. Hal Abelson (EECS) points out that going through the process of creating OCW actually allows faculty to reflect upon their own teaching practice; what they are doing with their own students. Once the content has been ‘separated’ from the education process you are able to think more deeply about the overall educational experience.

Prof. Vest goes on to say that openness is a successful way for bright people to innovate, as was the case with software – so for education. This would seem to draw in other topics from the Openness in Education course, particularly the Open Source topic.

From the video, intellectual property rights wasn’t as large an issue for the faculty at MIT as had been anticipated. Instead there was more of a concern about quality of product and service to end user.

The MIT initiative celebrated its ten year anniversary in April last year. In those intervening years, MIT through ‘OCW has shared materials from more than 2000 courses with an estimated 100 million individuals worldwide.’ (http://ocw.mit.edu/about/next-decade/ accessed 27 January 2012). Well over a million visits are logged each month on MIT OCW, accessed from 200 countries.

I guess paralleling the MIT OCW, the Open High School of Utah is committed to making available its entire curriculum as Open Courseware, thus providing a freely available high school level education.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium

The OpenCourseWareConsortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations committed to advancing OpenCourseWare and its impact on global education. They serve as a resource for starting and sustaining OCW projects, as a coordinating body for the movement on a global scale, and as a forum for exchange of ideas and future planning. (http://ocwconsortium.org/en/aboutus/abouttheocwc accessed 27 Jaunary 2012).

Individuals, whether they represent Consortium members or not, are welcome to use and modify materials and resources found on this website, and to participate in discussions, webinars, communities of interest, and other Consortium activities. (http://ocwconsortium.org/en/members/howtojoin accessed 27 January 2012).

There is a useful search facility on the site to allow access to courseware from member institutions, with course descriptions and overviews, and links to access and download the full courseware or individual sections. You can also access courses via the categorizations or the catalog.

The Toolkit section of the Consortium’s website has a collection of resources (or a ‘shed full of toolkits’) to help with development of an OCW project. This will prove very useful for me personally in the immediate future.

There is a master list of Consortium members, or you can use the map or list of countries/regions to narrow down your search to a geographical area.

In the UK there are six OpenCourseWare Consortium members:

Institutions of Higher Education   

• People’s Open Access Education Initiative
• The Open University
• The University of Nottingham

Organizational Members

• iBerry
• JISC
• The Higher Education Academy (HEA)

This compares with 51 from the USA, four from Canada, one from Australia, 39 from Spain, and 25 from Japan.

#change11 week 16 Irvine & Code – Post 1

Don’t confuse the message with the medium.

This is the new mantra for established business models that are finding it difficult to adapt to the 21st Century. The primary example often quoted is that of newspapers. The message in this case is a rigorous journalistic approach to news coverage and strong editorial comment. The medium doesn’t matter, be it paper, a blog, or what ever.

The same can therefore be applied to Higher Education. People want quality, rigour, challenging, all combining to change them and their thinking, improving their knowledge and experience. The medium, in this case university, is again becoming questionable.

So from this week’s reading,

What can brick and mortar Universities do to adapt, innovate, remain both competitive and relevant in this situation? In essence, become part of the 21st century? We will discuss the issues universities face and how they can meet the demands of students for flexibility.

This obviously starts from the point that it is actually a good thing for universities to remain and persist in being the gatekeepers of accreditation for degree qualifications. This might not always be the case, certainly in specific areas where professional qualifications might hold greater kudos. Added to this, it is projected that bricks & mortar universities can’t meet the increasing future demand for higher education globally, they couldn’t be built fast enough.

It’ll be interesting to do further reading from this week of the course to develop a greater understanding.

 

Openness in Education Course

So I chanced upon a tweet yesterday about David Wiley’s new Openness in Education Course starting that day and thought, ‘Yep, I need to be involved in that.’ I fired off my application to register this blog as the vehicle I’ll be using in the process. And here I go.

Block Posters

I was immediately impressed with Block Posters.

You can take any of your images and then decide how you’d like it sliced up. Download the pdf file and each of these slices can now be printed out and put together to create a great big poster.

This can be used to create artworks around your home, blow ups of your favourite photos at a fraction of the price, etc. Also, it can be used in the classroom for displaying material to students, or by students to display their ideas and emphasis their points. Extending that idea, when university students have to produce posters this could be an alternative to expensive production via professional printers; I’m all for reducing the cost of education. But for an alternative approach remember Glogster.

BBC On Top of the Digital World

At the end of last week I was too tired to actually do any research or writing so I sat back and went onto BBC iPlayer. I usually look in the factual section: it means I might take in some useful information during a time when I wouldn’t necessarily be doing anything productive. I noticed a learning sub-category and clicked on it. There were lots of programmes for younger children and then down at the bottom was ‘On Top of the Digital World‘, from the BBC Learning Zone and aimed at 11-19 year old learning. The Learning Zone runs overnight on BBC 2, so you can set up a recording and watch the information programmes at another time.

I began watching it and thought, “WOW this is so good”. Over the weekend I managed to find time to play both available episodes. I think that the format is great. The programmes are 1 hr long per episode, but there are multiple articles each lasting between about five and 10 minutes long covering topics about how young people are using and interacting in the ‘Digital World’. This material can inform all age groups, and could certainly be useful to some of my colleagues.

Episode 1 covers:

• Cyber celeb (0 – 6mins)
• Checking you out online – identity (6 – 11min 57sec)
• Hey that’s mine – copyright (11min 57sec – 18min 52sec)
• A day in the life of Jellyellie (18min 53sec – 25min 35sec)
• Anything goes online? – good/bad information (25min 35sec – 32min 20sec)
• Cyberbullying ( 32min 20sec – 39min 52sec)
• Getting the message out – political campaigning (39min 53sec – 45min 25sec)
• Cyberstalking (45min 25sec – 52min 12sec)
• What’s the point of age rated games? (52min 12sec – 58min – 57sec)

Episode 2 covers:

• Making money online (0min – 7min 10sec)
• Catching the copycat – plagiarism (7min 10sec – 12min)
• Brains behind the games (12min – 17min 54sec)
• The past online (17min 54sec – 24min 20sec)
• Buying and selling online (24min 20 sec – 31min 26sec)
• When gaming takes over – gaming addiction (31min 26sec – 38min 39sec)
• Accessibility (38min 39sec – 45min 38sec)
• Marketing online (45min 38sec – 52min 31sec)
• Blogging (52min 31sec – 58min 52 sec)

I don’t know how long these will be available on iPlayer (programmes usually last about a week on there), but if they are still available then they are well worth a look for any age.

Link to the On Top of the Digital World site for iPlayer.

Keynote: Chris Lehmann

The PETE&C Tuesday Morning Keynote: Chris Lehmann:Chris Lehmann is the Principal at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. http://scienceleadershi…

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Next Generation Textbooks – Flexbooks

Sometimes you encounter something that changes your own mindset, the way you work, the way you want to do things. You want to get involved, to make this better. I’ve just come across one such idea.

The work of the CK-12 Foundations is mindblowingly excellent. Their mission is to create access to cheap textbooks both for the US and Worldwide. How will they achieve this? Well, they’re pioneering the ‘Flexbook‘, which is an open-content, web-based collaboration model where it’s possible to take Creative Commons Licensed content from one of the available standard text on the site and repurpose it for the learning experience required. This is achieved using the online software to extract chapters or sections from the text, mix it with your own content from a Word file for example, and package it together into a ‘book’ that can be exported to a pdf file for printing out and use with learners.

For cK-12’s much better explanation:

• read their About us section
• and (please) view the video

Screenshot of Flexbook site

This needs to be made to work in a much wider contexted. This template could be used throughout education. It’s brilliant. It works for both formal learning setting and individual, informal learning.

TED & FORA – video presentations

TED, which stands for Technology, Education and Design, though the scope has broadened out over the years, is undoubtedly the most significant site of its kind. It hosts a multitude of categorized videoed presentations by respected people from all kinds of fields covering a host of topics. TED has the taglines “Ideas worth spreading” and “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world“. If you’ve never seen it, I thoroughly recommend spending some time investigating it in much more detail. I’ve been using it for some years.

FORA.tv is a similar site to TED. It too has videos of presentations, and discussion, given by noted people. Its tagline is “Fuel the Enlightenment“. I was rather pleased when I stumbled upon it. Also worth spending some time browsing the content.

Experiment and discussion

I’ve recently written a couple of blog post that are receive a bit of attention, the first was about the changing role of education and the second about Nurphy a new online service for conversations. I’ve decided to see if I can combine then by asking question about one on the other and seeing what happens. It’s a bit of an experiment really.

So, here goes. I’ve posted the following up as a conversation that anyone can join, once registered with Nurphy. Will people be willing to sign up for an untested service at this early stage? I’ll find out. The conversation starts here.

Whatever, I’d still like people’s opinions about the following.

Is the rise of the Professional Amateur Pro-Am, the increase in open educational resources (OER), personal learning environments (PLE), and greater significance of informal learning and research going to lead to a move away from an emphasis on institutional, formal learning?

As people are able to continually express their skills, abilities and achievements via social media, will formalized accreditation, with potentially out-dated assessment systems, be less relevant?

Or are formal learning and research institutions able to adapt quickly enough to the new requirements of society?

Open research – Professional Amateurs – Science in Action

I recently wrote a post that touched upon openness of and elitism in education. I just wanted to express a few more quick thoughts on this, though it is something I intend to return to with a more in-depth look at open education and resources.

I feel the elitism of universities doesn’t lie with who is allowed to become a students, it is more related to the fact that resources are securely tied up within universities making those resources inaccessible to the majority. Resources in this context could be books or journals (hard copies or online with paid for institutional subscriptions), the academic discourse, the talents of faculty, the research equipment and facilities, past Ph.D. theses, etc. In addition, it relates to the subjects and specific topics that are deemed to be worthy of teaching or researching, or what the funders deem so.

Universities deal in the currency of degrees, a passport in society. Why in times of recession, such as at present, should it be that otherwise capable individuals are denied their chance of a degree passport because the government puts a squeeze on the number of places available in order to balance the books? A further point is the question of assessment, and is it really a useful measure, or is the ongoing presentation of someone’s work, either within a university or indeed outside it (informal learning), a better reflection of their capabilities and abilities? Indeed, evidence is beginning to accumulate indicating that those who present their work using social media place themselves in a more advantageous position for employment. And shouldn’t publicly funded research be in the public domain anyway? I’ve previously written about Open Notebook Science.

I can envisage how much of this could be opened up to greater access, but I was having a problem with scientific equipment and facilities and how that might be liberated.

There have been some interesting examples where institution based science projects have reached out to the public for assistance. There was SETI were you signed up and your computer were utilized while it was on (and you weren’t using it) to process data to search for extra-terrestrial life. Then I recall a project were public volunteers were called for to look for new astronomical bodies in tens of thousands of photographs of space; these were provided online and after doing a test to see how accurately you could assess the images you could process the live data. It was discovered that humans were much better at seeing differences in the data than if the processing was done electronically with image recognition.

Therefore, in a rather detached way people were participating in scientific research.

However, I then heard the repeat of the Friday 25 September Science in Action programme^* on BBC World Service at 4:32GMT on Sunday morning. (Sometimes I’m awake in the night or wake up early.) Listen to the programme. The significant part where this blog post is concerned is the DIYbio article. The article talked about people who are undertaking scientific research, bio-engineering in this case, in their own homes using inexpensive equipment, some bought secondhand on Ebay(R) for a fraction of its cost new to a research lab. They are able to design and create new biological parts, devices and systems. Integral to this approach is the support from online communities, DIYbio.org for example, sometimes with professionals voluntarily assisting these communities.

Clay Shirky has talked about the increase in mass amateurization, without being amateurish. This is the breaking down of the dichotomy between ‘experts’ and amateurs, with the creation of a new category – the Professional Amateurs or Pro-Ams. Charles Leadbeater in his book We-Think talks about how mass creativity has seen sites including Wikipedia and Youtube, and the Linux operating system rise in prominence and signal a shift in the way we and society can organise ourselves; participation becoming the key element.

All of this, for me raises the question, “Are universities, education systems and society more generally getting ready for the future of learning and research?”

^* This particular programme doesn’t seem to be archived, though you can usually listen to the previous two recent episodes, so I guess you’ve probably got a couple of week to hear it before the link is broken.