Class of 2012 by P2PU / CC BY-SA
(See all Class of 2012 workshop participants)

It’s been an exciting year for School of Open, from the P2PU residency in Berlin, to the curriculum building meeting in Palo Alto, to the various course building workshops we ran in Helsinki, London, Mexico City, Berlin, and more. Our community, which started off with two active volunteers at the beginning of July, has since grown into a diverse group of voices and interests. However, we all share the common goal of furthering openness in our respective fields, and helping others to take advantage of open resources to further their own goals — whether they are teachers, artists, researchers, or students.

Below are highlights from the “Class of 2012,” and below that is what you can expect from the School of Open community in 2013 — because the world didn’t end after all.

2012 highlights

Note: The “we” pronoun used below refers to the School of Open community collectively, which consists of volunteers from the CC and P2PU communities – and beyond!

Building the School of Open / mollyali / CC BY

• During the P2PU residency in Berlin, we put our heads together and figured out the what, how, and who of the School — including basic governance structure and logistics, philosophy, guidelines, and an initial set of short courses for independent learning.
• These courses are Teach Someone Something with Open Content (part one and two); Get Creative Commons Savvy; and the Open Access Wikipedia Challenge. Lots of people have taken these courses already, and you can, too.
• We planned the curriculum for more courses with a fantastic group of open advocates and experts at a two-day Convening on an Open Policy Institute and School of Open in Palo Alto.


Helsinki Class Group Shot / Timothy Vollmer / CC BY

• We also held smaller course building workshops and discussion sessions at the Open Knowledge Festival, the Mozilla Festival, the Open Ed Conference, the Summit on Open Strategies, and the CC- Africa, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America regional meetings. You can see all events on our roadmap.
• We held our first real world course sprint at the Open Video Forum, resulting in the draft course, A Look at Open Video. (A course sprint is like a book sprint, but the end result is a course instead of a book.)
• We also held our first real world class in Ann Arbor, Michigan, based on Get CC Savvy.
• We discussed and settled on a course review process for all School of Open courses…

…in the spirit of open governance, because we strive to work as openly and transparently as our name makes us out to be!

What to expect in 2013

The Library of Congress / No known copyright restrictions

In 2013:

• We will officially launch our first set of courses during Open Education Week! (March 11-15). We have 16 courses in development: the bulk of these will be designed for independent learning, such as Get CC Savvy, but a few, such as Copyright 4 Educators, will be facilitated for a set period of time beginning in March. You can check out the full list of draft courses at http://schoolofopen.org.
• We will run more offline workshops around the world. In fact, we are developing a course to prepare people for the delivery of workshops on open culture and related topics in informal spaces.
• We will run additional course sprints. We have one in mind around open science data (watch out Bay Area) and another on open video (Berlin or London).

With the development of 16 courses; the running of offline workshops in cool spaces; and the emergence of the course sprint — we have a very full year ahead of us! If you would like to help shape any of the courses or activities above, join us at https://groups.google.com/group/school-of-open and introduce yourself and your area of interest. Additional ways to get involved and more info at http://schoolofopen.org.

That’s all folks! We wish you a wonderful holiday and a happy new year.