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.

Quizlet ™ Flashcard based memory testing

Quizlet™ is a rather good flashcard based learning tools.

You can create your own set of flashcards or use the large library created by others and made public.

The flashcards allow you to learn subject terms in a number of ways, and test yourself or your students also in a number of ways, including quiz questions and a couple of game based tests.

I personally particularly enjoyed the scatter game, where you have to drag terms onto their definitions, or vice versa, against the clock. You can then repeat the game and try to beat your best time.

This demo screencast explains Quizlet™ nicely.

Existing flashcards you can use to learn with are categorized into:

• Arts & Literature
  • Literature
  • Authors
  • Books
  • Music
  • Visual Arts
  • Performing Arts
  • Others
• Languages & Vocabulary
  • Parts of Speech
  • English and European Languages
  • Asian & Pacific Languages
  • Chinese Languages
  • Japanese Languages
  • Indian Languages
  • Middle Eastern Languages
  • Slavic Languages
  • Others
• Maths & Science
  • Chemistry
  • Earth Sciences
  • Engineering
  • Health Sciences
  • Life Sciences
  • Mathematics
  • Physics
• History & Geography
  • Anthropology
  • Civics
  • History
  • Religion
  • Countries
  • Regions
  • Cities
• Standardized Tests
• Professional & Careers
  • Business & Financial
  • Computers & Engineering
  • Healthcare & Medicine
  • Law
  • Others

Kahn Academy – DIY OER to Educate the World

Last Friday was an interesting day. I was tipped off by a colleague, Paul Leman, about the Kahn Academy when he sent me a link to Glen Moody’s blog post. At first sight the Kahn Academy looked like a fantastic resource, with 1000+ videos on various topic for students of all ages. But being one who never takes things on face value, I wanted to check things out and see what others were saying about this resource. That’s when I found David Wiley’s post which explained how there was no Creative Commons license attached to the content. I had a look and he seemed to be right. David had written to Sal Kahn the creator of the Kahn Academy previously, but he decided to drop him a further email. Then, as is evident from the comments David received on his post, everyone was immensely pleased to see that by the end of that day Sal had acted on David’s call and prominently displayed the CC license on the Kahn Academy homepage making it an OER for reuse, remixing, sharing, etc. I immediately embedded this video in my Daily Interests blog under the title Education for the World until I had time to write in more detail.

Now I have to take my hat off to Sal Kahn for a truly immense resource. What he has achieved with the Kahn Academy is nothing short of incredible. Single handedly generating instructional videos covering subjects including:

• Economics
• Finance
• Chemistry
• Arithmetic
• Pre-algebra
• Algebra
• Geometry
• Biology
• Trigonometry
• Precalculus
• Statistics
• Probability
• Calculus
• Differential Equations
• History
• Linear Algebra
• Physics

What a wealth of information. This has to be place in the category alongside Academic Earth and Udemy.

This story excites me on a number of levels. Perhaps one of the most significant is the difference anyone can make by openly publishing knowledge online to freely educate others. It’s an approach I’m trying to take myself to make a difference, however small; it is something that I passionately believe in. More power to anyone and everyone doing the same.

Udemy – Academy of You

I’ve posted previously about accessing lectures from prestigious universities via the Academic Earth site. Today I found Udemy – Academy of You. This too is a site that has videos of courses from several well know universities, including Stanford, UCLA, and Yale. With a whole range of subjects covered. At a glance, there doesn’t seem to be as many available here as on Academic Earth, but the significant thing is that anyone can register and create courses on Udemy, in “less than 5 minutes” is the claim.

You can use video and presentations, and there is the option for tutors and students to interact live using chatrooms and whiteboards. There is also integration with video hosting sites and Slideshare the presentation hosting site to make things easier if you already have content online you want to use.

Tutors can charge a fee for their courses and Udemy charges for this.

This video explains:

To me this is an interesting and exciting concept.

Digital Literacy

BECTA does some great stuff. School age is where digital literacy is instilled and developed, not HE.

BECTA has come up with a short guide (pdf) which explains what digital literacy is. Also, there is a Digital Literacy Planning Tool (pdf) that helps digital literacy to be incorpoated into teaching.

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.

OpenLearn 3 years on & OLnet

[Additional (25/1/10): Many thanks to Patrick McAndrew for taking the time to comment and clarify some points in my post that I had misinterpreted from the presentation. Please read Patrick’s comment for correction to my piece.]

Thanks to a tip off by @mweller I found out about the Berrill Stadium webcast by the Open University (OU) about OpenLearn 3 Years On. I didn’t manage to see the webcast live, but watched the video afterwards (available from the Berrill Stadium link – click on “Past Events”, then look for Tuesday 19th January 2010 in the list and click on “OpenLearn 3 Years On” – videos are at the bottom of the page). All I can say is Wow.

Here are some of the points I pulled out from Patrick McAndrew’s initial presentation. Patrick is the Associate Director (Learning & Teaching).

OpenLearn:

• reached 10 million users by January 2010
• has a global reach
• less than 50% of users from UK
• brings students into UK (~13000 went on to enroll on OU courses)
• reaches new sectors of students not usually entering HE
• the fact that it’s free reduces the barrier to participation
• means the OU can experiment with courses and technologies
• improves the understanding of the learning process

OpenLearn acted not only as a place to provide open resources, but as a research mechanism to reflect on the experiment and gather evidence to share what advantages OER can bring to the world. The OU worked in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University in the US, who had the Open Learning Initiative, allowing them to research and explore people’s use of open resources.

There has been an expansion of this type of work through the Open Courseware Consortium, of which many universities are members.

From this work, the OU is to act as a hub for OER in the UK, and receive hefce funding.

OLnet is the next phase in this activity (due for public beta Feb 2010), and will be subsuming the resources from OpenLearn. OLnet will be collecting and collating views from the wider community, listening to others, testing ideas including designing materials and other tools for learning, and gathering data through interviews and generally talking to people. This will generate evidence about OER for sharing with the community. It is hoped that findings about participatory learning and how people learn from key resources will lead to a greater understanding of potential future learning.

What has come out of OpenLearn is that quality content attracts people and enables a community to develop around a topic. And a proportion of people want to learn with people like themselves as a social activity, where they can collaborate, share expertise and spread control.

The OU has developed a useful structure where open research runs in conjunction with open learning.

Laura Dewis, the Managing Editor for OpenLearn, explained a little more about OLnet and how open resources can bring people closer to the OU. There are to be more regular updates of content, so that people interested in items making the news can develop a greater contextual understanding.

There are three levels of use for the open resources site;

• Explore – play & browse,
• Try – a bit more depth,
• Study – no degree or tutorial support.

There will also be easy links to registration for formal learning courses.

I find it very interesting what the Open University is doing here. I’m also interested by the linkage between informal and formal learning processes, and this desire for at least a big enough proportion of informal learners to want to enroll and study a formal course. But it also emphasizes this latent desire for knowledge from quality OER, and that is the area where I’d like to be involved, as shown from my recent post that considered the use of a VLE for Open Education.

Textbook Revolution

This seems like an interesting concept. It’s a site set up by students looking at bringing together in one location freely available online textbooks. The idea of introducing and using such material in lecture courses by both academics and the student population is rather an appealing concept in the present financial climate. This also works well for the idea of informal learning and open educational resources (OER).

The categories across the top of the page seem a little sparse at present, hopefully this will change soon. However, passing your mouse over the Books link reveals two menu items By Subject and By License. The By Subject item shows a useful list of subject to choose from.

Then clicking on any of these items provides a list of available books, with title, author and license arrangements listed.

If you have knowledge of any books that could be added to the lists, then there is an option to submit them.

Link: Textbook Revolution

Tom Whitby talks Twitter, PLN, and social media in teaching

I find this video today. It’s only 2min 30sec long and was filmed at a conference. It’s a very quick interview with Tom Whitby (@tomwhitby) where he talks about the use of Twitter by the teaching community and how this is an element of a personal learning network (PLN). He then goes on to explain the importance of social media for students who are learning for an ever changing world.

Video: Guide to Diigo Annotations

Yesterday I wrote about Google Sidewiki and its potential use for annotations. However, you might have gathered that I’m a big BIG fan of Diigo, and I mentioned its use for educational annotation in that same article.

José Picardo has produced a short informative video for his students about using Diigo annotations and sending a link to the pages including annotations.