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 https://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/

4. Share/embed this video: YouTube or Vimeo (embedded above)
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