School Of Open Workshop WMDE / Elly Köpf / CC BY-SA

After a quick introduction, we checked out the existing School of Open course program and all features of the P2PU user interface. The mission then was to get a first set of courses in German off the ground by either translating existing courses and/or developing new ones — and that’s what we did:

Work on three courses began, partly translating the content, partly enhancing it. One course was envisioned from scratch, aiming at giving educators an idea of how OER work, why they matter and how. Here are the courses that are in development:

• Bilder auf Wikimedia Commons hochladen – In diesem Kurs kannst du lernen, wie einfach es ist, Inhalte auf Wikimedia Commons hochzuladen und damit die große Datenbank freier Bilder weiter zu ergänzen.
  English translation: Upload images to Wikimedia Commons – In this course you will learn how easy it is to upload content on Wikimedia Commons, and thus complement the large database of free images.
• Wie erstelle ich einen Kurs auf P2PU?- Du möchtest einen Kurs anlegen und mit anderen dein Wissen teilen? Hier findest du in wenigen Schritten eine Anleitung.
  English translation: How to create a course on P2PU – You want to create a course and share your knowledge? Here you can find a tutorial in a few steps.
• Freie Lernmaterialien in der Schule – OER für Lehrkräfte – Mit diesem Kurs lernen Sie die Bedeutung von Open Educational Resources, kurz OER, den freien Lehr- und Lernmaterialien, kennen.
  English translation: Free learning materials in schools – OER for teachers – This course will teach you the importance of open educational resources (OER) and the freedom of teaching and learning materials.

At the end of the day, a start had been made and the participants collected a lot of ideas about how to improve and develop the School of Open program. A network began to emerge of interested experts and enthusiasts, many of whom will join the School of Open discussion list (Google Group) in order to get involved.

If you would like to help us develop the courses above, or create new ones in German, please email legal@creativecommons.de or join the School of Open discussion list and introduce yourself and your interest!

For the German summary of the event, see the Wikimedia Germany blog.

Photo by

Celebrating Open Data

Open Data Day 2013 can be described as a success. Why? Because hundreds of people participated in more than 100 events distributed across six continents all over the world, celebrating open data and all that we can do with it. Here at CC, we planned and executed a community-supported event to build open learning resources around the topic of Open Science, done in a hackathon-style sprint event that gathered people with diverse backgrounds and experience levels. An undergraduate student and a post-doc researcher, both from Stanford. An instructional designer from Los Angeles and an associate professor from Auburn University, plus a handful more of very talented people. Oh, and a mother and high school-aged daughter duo that simply wanted to see what “open” is about. We all connected to help build an open course to teach others about Open Science. Here’s how we did it.

Open Content for Learning

It’s worth mentioning that the course materials that were produced during the sprint will be openly licensed CC BY and shared so that their benefit to Open Education and Open Science are not restricted by legal boundaries. The material is being curated and will undergo a review process over the next couple weeks before being ported to the School of Open, a collaborative project by Creative Commons, P2PU, and a strong volunteer community of “open” experts and organizations. Though fitting the content to P2PU’s online course platform was in the back of our minds, time and consideration were largely placed on identifying important ideas that explain what Open Access, Open Research, and Open Data mean for Open Science, and how we can engage more “young scientists” (this is an ever-broadening term) in the ways of Open.

Photo by Billy Meinke / CC-BY

The Net Works Effect*

Adding a layer on top of open content itself, which is elastic in nature, our approach to this hackathon-style event focused on being very lean, the type of event that can be run by anyone, anywhere, and requiring very few resources. We created a Google Drive folder and a set of publicly-editable documents to collect openly-licensed resources, map out a tentative module/lesson plan, coordinate communications between participants, and generally provide a single place to collaborate on Open Science learning materials. Connecting with other event organizers at the OKFN and PLOS, mailing lists, Twitter hashtags, and other forms of communication were established so that there was a support network for those who were organizing events and those who were interested in participating in Open Data Day events on some level. David Eaves, Rufus Pollock, Ross Mounce, and many others were loud and clear on the Open Data Day mailing list, making sure news about each event was passed around.

Before the event, a registration page was created for the course sprint. We offered a handful of in-person tickets for folks to come down to our office in Mountain View, as well as a number of remote participant tickets for those who were in different geographical locations. Google Hangout “rooms” were set up on laptop computers placed in physical conference rooms at the CC HQ, allowing remote participants to work in real-time with persons on the ground. To see a more detailed description of the day’s event, see the schedule document here.

Deliverables

So what did we make? The sprinters involved in the project collected and organized resources that explain common aspects of Open Science. The main sections (access, methods, data) were helpful in searching for content, but there was a great deal of overlap between sections, which highlighted the relationhips between them. Beyond the collection of resources, sets of tasks were built that are meant to guide learners out beyond the course and into the communities of Open Science, interacting with the ideas, technical systems, and people who are opening up science. The Introduction to Open Science course on P2PU is still in a lightly-framed state, but the plan is to include the course in the launch of the School of Open during Open Education Week, March 11-15. If you’re interested in helping make this transition or to help build or review other courses that we call “open,” come introduce yourself in the School of Open Google Group. Or check out what else is happening on P2PU.

Beyond the course itself, we’re going to take a look at the sprint process we used, and work out some of the kinks. This rapid open-content creation technique is manageable, low-cost, and builds the Commons. There’s enough openly-licensed content existing on the web to produce a range of learning experiences, so now it seems that it’s a matter of developing open technology tools to the point where we can build education on the web together, easily. For more information about this and other Open Education projects being worked on by Creative Commons, see this page.

We Got Together for Open

Thanks to those who were able to participate in the Open Science course, as well as those who contributed the planning documents leading up to the event. We’ve done well.

Related Posts

PLOS Sci-Ed Blog, Guest Post: Open Data Day, Course Sprints, and Hackathons!
David Eaves’ Blog, International #OpenDataDay: Now at 90 Cities (and… the White House)
Debbie Morrison’s Blog, A Course Design ‘Sprint’: My Experience in an Education Hackathon

Also: The Flickr album from the event can be found here.

*This phrase coined by P. Kishor here, describing the interconnectedness of Open Data Day events.

If you are serious about a Creative Commons project idea, you may be interested in the free, online course, “Getting your CC project funded,” set to run in April. The course consists of a series of workshops and seminars that will take you through the steps from an initial idea to having a finished project proposal for submission, including assistance in identifying and finding funding bodies and collaborations relevant for your project. You provide the idea; the course provides the guidance to turn it into a proposal that can’t be refused.

The course will be run by Jonas Öberg from the Nordic CC network, a lecturer at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden with extensive grant writing and reviewing experience with the European Commission and several Nordic cultural foundations. “Getting your CC project funded” will run on the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) in April, and we especially invite CC Affiliates and friends to participate!

As with all P2PU courses, the course is free to take. Though only 15 active participants will be accepted into the course, the entire course, material, and other information, including the proposals which you write in the course, will be open for anyone to follow on the P2PU platform under the CC BY-SA license.

You can read more at http://p2pu.org/general/getting-your-cc-project-funded. You may start brainstorming at anytime, but official sign-up opens March 31.

If you already have experience writing and reviewing funding proposals… you may be interested in joining the team of expert external reviewers. More info on the current team is available on our wiki. If interested, please contact Jonas directly or janepark [at] creativecommons [dot] org. Though the course itself will be run in English, project proposals may be written and reviewed in English, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Russian and Bulgarian. More languages may be added depending on the final team of reviewers.

P2PU is simultaneously launching its School of Webcraft, which is a collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation and “is a powerful new way to learn open, standards based web development in a collaborative environment. School of Webcraft courses include Beginning Python Webservices and HTML5.”

In addition, Creative Commons Counsel Lila Bailey is co-facilitating the Copyright for Educators course this round, which will focus on United States law. The course is “for educators who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing” and “is taught around practical case studies faced by teachers when using copyright material in their day to day teaching and educational instruction.” For more information, see the course page.

Sign-ups for all other courses are available at http://p2pu.org/course/list. The deadline to sign up is September 8, and courses will run until October 27th. All courses are free to take and openly licensed under CC BY-SA. For more information, see the full announcement, but stay tuned for more courses!

Digital Journalism 2010 is “an introduction to online journalism, citizen media and the use of social networks for journalism and collective action. Participants will work on self defined projects either as individuals or in groups using any combination of media types including video, photographs, illustrations and text as well as online tools such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and any other reasonable tool the participant or team would like to use.” In addition to learning about how the journalism landscape is rapidly changing, participants will learn to research and create news online by publishing stories of their own in teams. These stories will be presented to the class (and the world).

The course is a work in progress, so the community can contribute by suggesting readings, activities, and more. P2PU is looking for course organizers to facilitate the P2PU end of things. If interested, please contact thepeople [at] p2pu.org. To participate in the course remotely via P2PU, you can sign up to apply at www.p2pu.org/journalism. Sign-up is open now and the course will begin on Friday, 4 June.

Joi teaches Digital Journalism annually as part of the Keio Graduate School of Media Design. He has contributed pieces to the New York Times, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and Wired. He is also a prolific photographer and if you didn’t already know, the CEO of Creative Commons.

The Peer 2 Peer University is “a grassroots education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls.” In addition to leveraging existing OER, P2PU licenses all of its own courses under CC BY-SA. For more on why P2PU chose this license, visit http://p2pu.org/license.

WikiPremed is the result of fifteen years of hard work, founded by John Wetzel, a graduate of Stanford University who has been helping “premedical students prepare for the MCAT in small group teaching through over fifty course cycles.” The site is comprehensive in scope, basically a course “in the undergraduate level general sciences,” consisting of textbooks, flash cards, test questions, images, and more that a premed student would need to prepare for the MCAT. All materials are available for free under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, which means you can translate, improve, and republish it as long as you share alike.

What’s more interesting is that the site is sustaining itself by giving away digital content for free and charging for print materials, such as its Physics flashcards and print versions of its books. There is also an ask for a one-time $25 donation that then gives students an Organic Mechanisms Pocketbook and Advanced Physiology Crosssword Puzzle Book in return as a thank you. From Glyn Moody’s short interview of John Wetzel (which got picked up by techdirt),

“Students need printed study materials, and they get sick of the computer, so I definitely think there is room for creative commons educational content supported by print publications. I think there is an ethic to not holding content hostage to purchases, but I think there are commercial advantages to the open model as well. I don’t doubt that the average customer at WikiPremed has 1000 page views before purchasing anything.

I am sure that if there were registration walls and missing chapters I would have fewer customers.

I’m not getting rich or anything, at this point, but it is working.”

If you’re interested, you can help contribute to the WikiPremed case study.

“This six week course is targeted at educators who will gain basic skills in open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy; work on prototypes of innovative open education projects; and get input from some of the world leading innovators along the way.

The course will kick-off with a web-seminar on Thursday 2 April 2009 and run for 6 weeks.

Weekly web seminars introduce new topics ranging from content licensing to the latest open technologies and peer assessment practices. Participants will share project ideas with a community of peers, work on individual projects, and get feedback from experienced mentors. We will also take a close look at some of the most innovative examples of open education projects, and speak to the people who designed them, including:

The course is targeted at educators who want to help shape the open education future. Participants should have some knowledge of web technologies, or open content licensing, or open pedagogy (or all three), but don’t need to be experts.

Interested in participating? Head over to the course wiki, and submit your project idea!

Course outline: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/EduCourse

Sign-up page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/EduCourse/SignUp

For questions about the course or the sign-up process, contact:

Philipp Schmidt
Peer 2 Peer University
philipp AT peer2peeruniversity.org”

Spaces will fill up fast, but that doesn’t prevent non-registered learners from having open and complete access to the course as it plays out. And since all Mozilla Education materials are available for reuse, redistribution, and remixing under CC BY, nothing stops users from creating a mirror wiki and developing their own projects!