online courses
Welcome to the School of Open, Class of 2013
Happy Open Education Week! We are happy to announce that the School of Open community has launched its first set of courses…
The Library of Congress / No known copyright restrictions
Sign up for these facilitated courses
this week (sign-up will remain open through Sunday, March 17). These courses will start the week of March 18 (next week!). To sign up, simply click the “Start Course” button under the course’s menu navigation on the left.
- Copyright 4 Educators (US) – Sign up if you’re an educator who wants to learn about US copyright law in the education context.
- Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) – Sign up if you’re an educator who wants to learn about Australian copyright, statutory licenses and open educational resources (OER).
- Creative Commons for K-12 Educators – Sign up if you’re a K-12 educator (anywhere in the world) who wants to learn how to find and adapt free, useful resources for your classroom, and incorporate activities that teach your students digital world skills.
- Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond – Sign up if you want to learn how to edit Wikipedia or improve your editing skills — especially if you are interested in and knowledgeable about open educational resources (OER) (however, no background in this area is required).
All other courses are now ready for you to take
at any time, with or without your peers. They include:
- Get a CC license. Put it on your website – This course is exactly what the title says: it will help you with the steps of getting a CC license and putting it on your work. It’s tailored to websites, although the same steps apply to most other works.
- Open Science: An Introduction – This course is a collaborative learning environment meant to introduce the idea of Open Science to young scientists, academics, and makers of all kinds. Open Science is a tricky thing to define, but we’ve designed this course to share what we know about it, working as a community to make this open resource better.
- Open data for GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) – This course is for professionals in cultural institutions who are interested in opening up their data as open culture data. It will guide you through the different steps towards open data and provide you with extensive background information on how to handle copyright and other possible issues.
- Intro to Openness in Education – This is an introductory course exploring the history and impacts of openness in education. The main goal of the course is to give you a broad but shallow grounding in the primary areas of work in the field of open education.
- A Look at Open Video – This course will give you a quick overview of some of the issues, tools and areas of interest in the area of open video. It is aimed at students interested in developing software, video journalists, editors and all users of video who want to take their knowledge further.
- Contributing to Wikimedia Commons – A sister project of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons is a repository of openly licensed images that people all over the world use and contribute to. This challenge gets you acquainted with uploading your works to the commons.
- Open Detective – This course will help you explore the scale of open to non-open content and how to tell the difference.
And more… check out all the courses at http://schoolofopen.org/.
Join a launch event this week
School of Open at the Citizen Science Workshop / Levi Simons / CC BY
- P2PU: A Showcase of Open Peer Learning (Wednesday, March 13) – Join this webinar to see a showcase of some of P2PU’s best learning groups spanning topics from education to open content to programming to Spanish and more, and learn how you can participate.
- Open Video Sudan (all week, March 10-17) – Join the Open Video Forum in improving “A Look at Open Video” and creating new courses and resources on open video in Sudan.
And more events as part of Open Education Week at http://www.openeducationweek.org/events-webinars/.
Spread the word
Just do these 3 things and call it a day.
- 1. Tweet this:
#SchoolofOpen has launched! Take free courses on #copyright, #OER, #openscience & more: http://creativecommons.org/?p=37179
- 2. Blog and email this:
The School of Open has launched! Take a free online course on copyright, CC licenses, Wikipedia, open science, open culture, open video formats, and more at http://schoolofopen.org/. Especially check out this course: [link to course of your choice here]. Read more about the launch at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/37179.
- 3. Print out a copy of this pdf and pin it to the bulletin board at your work, school, or local coffee shop.
School of Open will launch during Open Education Week
As promised, the School of Open is launching its first set of courses during Open Education Week, March 11-15, 2013. This means that all facilitated courses will open for sign-up that week, and all stand-alone courses will be ready to take then or anytime thereafter. The School of Open is a community of volunteers developing and running online courses on the meaning and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and beyond. To be notified when courses launch, sign up for School of Open announcements.
Facilitated courses
Facilitated courses run for a set period of weeks after sign-up. Four courses will be open for sign-up the week of March 11. They are:
- Copyright 4 Educators (Aus) – A course for educators in Australia who want to learn about copyright, open content and licensing.
- Copyright 4 Educators (US) – A course for educators in the US who want to learn about copyright law.
- Creative Commons for K-12 Educators – A course for elementary educators who want to find and adapt free resources for their classes, and incorporate activities that teach their students digital world skills.
- Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond – A course on how to edit Wikipedia articles, focusing on articles covering the open educational resources (OER) movement.
Stand-alone courses
Ten new courses will be ready to take at any time independently after March 11. They are:
- A Look at Open Video – An overview of open video for students interested in developing software, video journalists, editors and all users of video who want to take their knowledge further.
- Open up your institution’s data – A course for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) professionals interested in opening up their institution’s data.
- Contributing to Wikimedia Commons – A course to get you acquainted with uploading your works to the commons – a repository of openly licensed images from all over the world.
- dScribe: Peer-produced Open Educational Resources – A course where you can learn the ins and outs of building OER together with your peers.
- Open Science: An Introduction – A course for both seasoned and new researchers who want to learn what makes science “open”, how they can find/use/build on open scientific works, and share their contributions back to the commons.
- Open Detective – This course will explore the scale of open to non-open content and how to tell the difference.
- How to run an “open” workshop – A course to prepare people for the delivery of workshops on Free Culture, Openness and related topics in informal spaces.
- Get a CC license. Put it on your website – A simple break-down of how to apply the CC license of your choice to your website so that it aligns with marking and metadata best practices.
- Open habits: making with the DS106 Daily Create – An hour-long challenge about building openness into your daily routine.
- Teachingcopyright.org (in Spanish) – A Spanish language course based on EFF’s http://teachingcopyright.org.
Events
In addition to courses, School of Open launch events are being held around the world in Germany, Kenya, Sudan, the U.S., and online. They are:
- CC Kenya’s School of Open launch (Feb 23 in Riruta, Kenya) – CC Kenya introduced the School of Open at the Precious Blood Secondary School this past Saturday. They hope to introduce the concept of “open” to high school students all over the country and engage them in the use of Open Education Resources (OER). Read about their efforts so far and stay tuned for a guest blog post reporting on how it went!
- Open Science Course Sprint: An Education Hackathon for Open Data Day (Feb 23 in Mountain View, US) – A sprint to build an intro course on open science also took place on Saturday. The debrief on that event is here.
- P2PU’s School of Open meets Wikimedia (March 3 in Berlin, Germany) – As part of Open Ed Week, CC Germany and Wikimedia Germany are putting on a workshop to create and translate School of Open courses into German, and to brainstorm ideas for new German courses about Wikipedia.
- Open Video Sudan (March 10-17 in Khartoum, Sudan) – Following on the open video course sprint in Berlin last year, the Open Video Forum is holding another open video course creation workshop in Sudan.
- School of Open at Citizen Science Workshop (March 10 in Los Angeles, US) – School of Open will join the monthly Citizen Science Workshop at the LA Makerspace to introduce the School, talk about open science data, and present the new intro to open science course.
- P2PU: A Showcase of Open Peer Learning (March 13 on the web) – This Open Ed Week webinar led by P2PU School of Ed’s Karen Fasimpaur will showcase some of P2PU’s best learning groups spanning topics from education to open content to programming to Spanish and more. Mark your calendars to join virtually on March 13 @ 3pm US PST / 10pm GMT.
Help us launch!
Here are 5 simple things you can do to get the word out to as many people as possible and make this launch a success:
- 1. Tweet this:
#SchoolofOpen will launch @openeducationwk (Mar 11-15). Preview courses & get notified: creativecommons.org/?p=36913 #oer
— creativecommons (@creativecommons) February 26, 2013
- 2. Blog and email this:
The School of Open (http://schoolofopen.org/) is launching during Open Education Week, March 11-15. A community of volunteers from P2PU, Creative Commons, Open.Michigan, and Wikimedia will offer free online courses on copyright, CC licenses, Wikipedia, open science, open data, open video formats, and more. I think you would be interested in the course on [insert course title here]. Get notified when it is open for sign-up at http://groups.google.com/group/school-of-open-announce. Read more about the launch at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/36913.
- 3. Add and hyperlink the School of Open logo along with the following blurb to your webpage:
Starting March 11, School of Open is offering free online courses on what “open” means and how it can help you. Learn more at http://schoolofopen.org/
- 5. Print and hand out copies of this one pager (pdf)
For the next two weeks, we are reviewing and finalizing courses for launch. If you want to help with any of that, please join the School of Open discussion list and introduce yourself.
School of Open logo incorporates "Unlock" icon from The Noun Project collection / CC BY 2 Comments »
School of Open returns to Berlin for a workshop with Wikimedia Germany
Wikimedia Office in Berlin / Hari Prasad Nadig / CC BY-SA
On March 2nd, the Creative Commons & P2PU School of Open will join forces with Wikimedia at the Wikimedia Germany offices in Berlin! As part of Open Education Week, CC Germany and Wikimedia Germany are kicking things off early with a workshop to introduce P2PU and the School of Open, and to create and translate School of Open courses in German, in addition to brainstorming ideas for new courses about Wikipedia as part of the School.
Event details
What: School of Open workshop
When: 2nd of March, 11 – 16:00
Where: Wikimedia Germany Offices, Obentrautstr. 72, 10963 Berlin
Who: Wikimedia Germany, Creative Commons Germany, P2PU community, all enthusiastic promoters of free knowledge with the desire to share their knowledge
RSVP: Space will accommodate up to 25 participants; please send an email to legal@creativecommons.de by Feb 27th so that we can keep track of who’s coming.
Language: Likely German
From Wikimedia Germany’s blog (and via Google translate),
“We want to start the year with a workshop with Creative Commons and the initiative “School of Open”! The initiative of Creative Commons and the Peer-2-Peer University (P2PU) aims to develop online courses that help you create free content and tools to use and develop. There are English courses on Wikipedia and the use of free content, but as of yet nothing in German. Also, the subject of “free educational content” is not yet represented in courses. So there is still much to do. As part of Open Education Week further work is required.
Together, we want to work intensively on the expansion of the existing courses. It will focus on tools and topics related to free access to knowledge. Anyone can create courses and remix existing courses on their own — but it’s best to share. After some brief input from Creative Commons, we will start working. So bring your ideas, and let’s share our knowledge!”
To participate, please RSVP to legal@creativecommons.de by February 27th!
1 Comment »Course Creation 101 with P2PU
P2PU is giving a webinar next week to help new and seasoned community members kickstart their courses, especially those just beginning to flesh out their ideas for a School of Open course! P2PU Learning Lead, Vanessa Gennarelli, will give an overview of the P2PU course design, and then dive into the step-by-step process of creating a course on the P2PU platform. I will also go over some tips and guidelines specific to creating a course as part of the School of Open, a community initiative that will offer courses on the meaning and application of “open” on the web and offline environments.
What: Course Creation 101 with P2PU (a webinar)
When: Wednesday, November 14 at 11am US pacific / 2pm US eastern
Where: Collaborate room, no registration or log-in required; simply click the following link: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.201F591479750E670246FFFB9315F5&sid=2008170. We recommend joining 5-10 minutes early to make sure you have the necessary system requirements.
If you can’t make this webinar, don’t worry; it will be recorded for posterity and linked from the P2PU website. You can also learn how to Make a P2PU course in 1/2 hour on your own while referencing these School of Open guidelines. P2PU has a help desk for platform issues you might encounter, and School of Open has a discussion list for iterative feedback.
No Comments »Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly receives President’s Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence
Cathy Casserly by Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching / CC BY
The OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC), a community of over 250 member institutions worldwide committed to sharing their courses online, has voted to present Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly with the President’s Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence, a special recognition of her extraordinary contributions to the open courseware community. Prior to Cathy’s role as the CEO of Creative Commons and Senior Partner and Vice President of Innovation and Open Networks at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Cathy,
“served as director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and guided more than $100 million in support to increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge sharing worldwide. Casserly’s work helped raise global awareness of resources, participants and their projects.”
We are thrilled for Cathy to receive this honor and for her continuing work supporting open educational resources (OER) at Creative Commons. Cathy, along with other distinguished recipients, will be presented the award at the upcoming OCWC meeting in May, celebrating 10 years of open courseware.
The Open CourseWare movement has taken off around the world, powered by CC licenses. Materials from 2,000 MIT courses are available for reuse, translation, and remix under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA) and nearly 800 MIT OCW courses have been translated into other languages. The Open Courseware Consortium contains over 250 global member institutions and affiliates, including the African Virtual University, Japan OCW Consortium, Open University Netherlands, and China Open Resources for Education.
2 Comments »CC Talks With: The Open Course Library Project
Copyright and related rights waived via CC0
Late last year, I caught wind of an initiative that was being funded by the Gates Foundation—it had to do with redesigning the top 80 courses of Washington State’s community college system and releasing them all under CC BY (Attribution Only). The initiative was called the Washington State Student Completion Initiative and the specific project that was dealing with redesign and CC licensing was the Open Course Library Project. I decided to find out more, so I set up a Skype date with Cable Green, the head of the project. Below is the transcribed interview, edited for clarity and cut as much as possible for 21st century attention spans.
Tell me a little bit about who you are, where you come from, and what your role is in open education.
Sure, my name is Cable Green. I’m the eLearning Director for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. Our system consists of 34 community and technical colleges and those colleges teach roughly 470,000 students each year. Our enrollments are growing fast in this recessionary period as people are looking to enhance their work skills and go back to college to get degrees and certificates.
Read More…
Peer 2 Peer University Launches Second Pilot
The Peer 2 Peer University, “a grassroots education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls” by leveraging social software and existing open educational resources, launched its second pilot and a new website today. The first pilot launched last September with seven courses, ranging from Creative Nonfiction Writing to Behavioral Economics. Due to high demand, P2PU has doubled its course offerings for the second round. From the press release,
“Some of the courses were offered in the first phase of the pilot which launched last September, but seven are brand new, including “Urban Disaster Risk Management,” “Mashing Up the Open Web,” and “Solve Anything! Building Ideas through Design.” P2PU is also excited to announce its first Portuguese language courses organized by Brasil’s Casa de Cultura Digital, one of which is an introduction to the thinking of Paulo Freire (educational theorist who is author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed). The P2PU community has grown and is excited to have these new courses and their organizers on board.”
Since last November’s workshop in Berlin, a few changes have taken place at P2PU. P2PU is still run and governed by volunteers, but the P2PU Council, with the support of the community, has elected Philipp Schmidt as its representing Director. Philipp is one of the co-founders of the project, as well as a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, which enables him to devote himself full time to P2PU. On becoming Director, Philipp says, “We have proven that the model works and are seeing tremendous interest from people all over the world to learn together. I am very excited to help guide the project through the next phase of growth and for the opportunity to work with the inspiring and talented volunteers that make P2PU so special.”
When asked how P2PU will affect the education landscape, Council member Delia Browne says, “P2PU will revolutionize how people learn. It will help create a global open culture of learning for the 21st century.”
The P2PU community consists of a diverse group of people. They are writers, teachers, designers, doctoral and alternative grad students, artists, copyright specialists, scientists, and blues guitar players. Above all, they are learners–peers working together to learn from each other.”
If you want to learn more about the Peer 2 Peer University, see my past post on them. All P2PU produced content is licensed under CC BY-SA, which means you are free to share, distribute and derive for your own mirror initiative as long as you share alike. “P2PU is teaching and learning by peers for peers and it is run and governed by volunteers. It builds on educational content that is free from copyright restrictions or licensed under Creative Commons licenses.” The deadline to sign up for courses is February 28. Courses will run for at least six weeks starting March 12. Each course may require different information and prerequisites to apply.
No Comments »The American Graduation Initiative
President Obama announced yesterday the American Graduation Initiative, a twelve billion dollar plan to reform U.S. community colleges. The initiative calls for five million additional community college graduates by 2020, and plans that “increase the effectiveness and impact of community colleges, raise graduation rates, modernize facilities, and create new online learning opportunities” to aid this goal.
A significant component of the initiative is the plan to “create a new online skills laboratory.” From the fact sheet,
“Online educational software has the potential to help students learn more in less time than they would with traditional classroom instruction alone. Interactive software can tailor instruction to individual students like human tutors do, while simulations and multimedia software offer experiential learning. Online instruction can also be a powerful tool for extending learning opportunities to rural areas or working adults who need to fit their coursework around families and jobs. New open online courses will create new routes for students to gain knowledge, skills and credentials. They will be developed by teams of experts in content knowledge, pedagogy, and technology and made available for modification, adaptation and sharing. The Departments of Defense, Education, and Labor will work together to make the courses freely available through one or more community colleges and the Defense Department’s distributed learning network, explore ways to award academic credit based upon achievement rather than class hours, and rigorously evaluate the results.”
It is important to note here the difference between “open” and simply accessible “online”. Truly open resources for education are clearly designated as such with a standard license that allows not only access, but the freedoms to share, adapt, remix, or redistribute those resources. The educational materials that make up the new open online courses for this initiative should be open in this manner, especially since they will result from a government plan. We are excited about this initiative and hope the license for its educational materials will allow all of these freedoms. Catherine Casserly, formerly in charge of open educational resources at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (now at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), writes,
“Today at Macomb College, President Barack Obama announced a proposal to commit $50 million for the development of open online courses for community colleges as part of the American Graduation Initiative: Stronger American Skills through Community Colleges. As proposed, the courses will be freely available for use as is and for adaption as appropriate for targeted student populations. The materials will carry a Creative Commons license.”
You can read the official announcement at the White House site on their blog and visit the briefing room for the full fact sheet.
1 Comment »Stanford Courses Available via BitTorrent
BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, has been embraced by Stanford University in distributing its online engineering courses. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) launched back in September, offering its open courseware under CC BY-NC-SA. Thanks to Ernesto at TorrentFreak for the tip:
“While some universities restrict the use of BitTorrent clients, others embrace the popular flilesharing protocol and use it to spread knowledge. Stanford University is one of the few to realize that BitTorrent does not equal piracy. They use BitTorrent to give away some of their engineering courses, with some success.”
Why does BitTorrent make sense for Stanford Engineering courses? Because unlike some of their OCW (Open CourseWare) counterparts, SEE offers more than just video lectures; Stanford Engineering Everywhere “provides downloads of full course materials including syllabi, handouts, homework and exams. Online study sessions through Facebook and other social sites are encouraged” (Stanford News Service). In addition to BitTorrent, the courses are also available via iTunes and YouTube.
You, too, can learn robotics!
No Comments »Two MIT OCW Courses Reach Million Visit Milestone
A long-standing provider of open courseware, MITOpenCourseWare reached a million visit milestone yesterday for two of their online courses: 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics and 18.06 Linear Algebra. The courses are two of MIT’s most popular to date, taught by renowned professors Walter Lewin and Gilbert Strang. From MIT’s media coverage on Lewin:
“Professor Lewin is an international webstar. He is well-known at MIT and beyond for his dynamic, inspiring and engaging lecture style. His courses are also among the most downloaded at iTunes U. 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics explains the basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics, fluid mechanics, and kinetic gas theory, and a variety of interesting topics such as binary stars, neutron stars, and black holes.”
On Strang:
“Strang is a 50-year mathematics veteran whose teaching style is recognized internationally. Linear Algebra introduces mathematical concepts that include matrix theory, systems of equations, vector spaces, and positive definite matrices. “Everyone has the capacity to learn mathematics,” says Strang. “If you can offer a little guidance, and some examples, viewers discover that a whole world is open.”
8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics offers lecture notes, exams with solutions, complete videotaped lectures and their accompanying transcripts under CC BY-NC-SA. 18.06 Linear Algebra offers (interactive) Java applets with sound in addition to video lectures and translations into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish, also under CC BY-NC-SA. CC BY-NC-SA allows for these kinds of adaptations and derivations of material—and translation is a crucial step in broadening access to a global audience.
There are other and more interesting ways to adapt material, however, and we are curious to know how the visitors constituting the 1,000,000+ hits of these two courses (and others) have actually used the materials. Since educational needs vary contextually, it would be beneficial to know what types of adaptations are being made beyond translation. Of the 600 visits per day that these courses average, how many of them result in derivations? These, and other questions (such as visitor demographic, global reach, etc.) are things to consider as the OCW project continues to expand and evolve. The future impact of OER lie in the ways information is conceptualized, organized, and related; simply offering up free content on the web is no longer enough—remember David Wiley’s quote from OpenEd 08: “If my students can Google it, I don’t have to teach it.” As progressive models of OER develop and evolve, it will be interesting to see how OCW’s scope and impact also grows.
No Comments »
