The OpenCourseWare Consortium has been one of the original OER pioneers. Earlier this year, we were able to announce that the membership of over 200 institutions has published more than 8000 (!) courses. As a movement and an organisation, we have arrived at an interesting and challenging moment. The focus is shifting from content to [...]
My colleague Juliet Stoltenkamp, the head of e-Learning at the University of the Western Cape, and I have been meeting with lecturers from different departments to speak about OCW and encourage them to publish some of their courses. Today we met with Karen Wallace from Chemistry and her feedback and comments really struck a chord [...]
We just sent out the announcement for an upcoming hands-on Mozilla course on open education. It’s organised by our friends from the Mozilla Foundation, with (some more friends) from ccLearn - and covers open licensing, open tech, and open pedagogy in a snappy 6 week package.
There are case-studies, prototyping, web-seminars and we are looking [...]
We just launched an information site about the Peer 2 Peer University ahead of an article that is supposed to appear in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education. I am blogging about it now, because by the time it comes out I will be on my way to the vast open plains of The Karoo … [...]
One factoid from the Open Ed conference in Utah that has been banging around the inside of my head is this: Apparently students that access video lectures online like to speed them up. At the University of Taiwan, students watch calculus lectures between 1.6 and 2 times faster than they were recorded. Willem from the [...]
Candace Thille from Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, spoke about a
research network that CM and the Open University UK are starting in
order to find better ways to analyse effectiveness of open educational
resources. Besides the much needed focus on rigorous analysis of the
benefits of open education on the individual learner (something that
only very few institutions other [...]
I just saw a great presentation by Haishuo Lee who works at a technical University of Taiwan. He presented a model that I think holds a lot of promise for UWC and other Universities in Africa as well.
The University created video lectures for three of its foundational courses (in this case Calculus I and II [...]
Today I received an email from the wonderful Delia Browne, who is chasing all open education track participants at the iSummit 08 (in Sapporo) for feedback on the event. Thorough review and feedback of workshops is something that doesn’t happen often enough — everyone is too busy to get on with the next one — [...]
Walking towards the conference venue on this last day of the open education track at the iSummit 08 I found myself humming along to the melody of Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack” - how fitting I thought - since this was truly the Return of the Track (the Open Education Track).
Last year Gunner and [...]
At the Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC) meeting in Dalian (China) the OCWC elected its first Board of Directors, concluded the ratification process for the by-laws by the membership, and announced its registration as a non-profit organisation in the State of Massachusetts. It’s no coincidence, that Massachusetts was chosen, since the MIT has been generous host, [...]
