Here’s another end of year list: all the awesome things the School of Open community accomplished in 2013. Last year, we highlighted the work we put into materializing School of Open as a concrete entity with goals and people involved. This year, we actually launched the School with a full set of online courses and kick-off events around the world!

But we didn’t stop there. All year long, our volunteers have been contributing in so many fantastic and unexpected ways that it’s been hard to wrap our brains around all the activity. So here’s my attempt at collecting and distilling everything here, as a teaser for the new School of Open landing page that will happen in 2014.

The biggest thing you should note about the School of Open is that it is no longer just a set of online courses sitting on the P2PU platform. It is a global community and movement of volunteers developing and running online or hybrid courses, face-to-face workshops, and real world training programs — all with the purpose of helping people do what they already do better with the aid of open resources and tools.

In 2013, we

• Launched 12 stand-alone courses for anyone to take at any time, with or without others.
• Ran a total of 11 facilitated courses on topics such as: Copyright 4 Educators, Designing Collaborative Workshops, Open Science, CC licensing, Writing Wikipedia Articles, and Why Open?
• Conducted initial research on the impact of some of these courses and completed a research residency with the OER Research Hub in Milton Keynes, England
• Hosted multiple workshops, course sprints, and other events across 5 continents (in countries like England, Germany, Kenya, China, Sudan, Argentina, South Africa, the U.S.)
• Started School of Open Kenya, an after school program for high school students teaching about open educational resources, CC licenses, and the open culture that they engender
• Put on an engineering and design challenge incorporating open source and CC licensing education for university students in China
• Ran a two-week OER summer camp for kids on Luxi island, an island in rural China (more info to follow in a guest blog post [updated])


OER summer camp on Luxi island ( ZHU Renkai / CC BY)

• Launched WikiProject Open, a community of new and experienced Wikipedians, dedicated to improving Wikipedia’s coverage of all things “open” and to using openly licensed content to improve Wikipedia articles in general
• Got the School of Open’s Writing Wikipedia Articles course adopted as part of a formal university course (the University of Mississippi’s “Open Educational Resources and Practices”)
• Piloted P2PU badges for 7 of our facilitated courses! For examples, check out this Remix OER badge and this Intro to Open Science Open Access badge
• Built a human timeline of the open education space! Which we want anyone and everyone to contribute to
• Helped turn a “collaborations across the open space” session at Mozfest into a funded part-time position that will help coordinate our open communities! (more info at this pad)
• Developed support resources for course facilitators, including this comprehensive tip sheet by a facilitator with a 95% retention rate
• Created a couple videos for online conferences, like this one for K-12 educators and this one for Open Ed Week
• Showcased School of Open projects by CC affiliates at the Creative Commons Global Summit in Buenos Aires…

…and more, all of which you can check out in detail on the CC blog at https://creativecommons.org/tag/school-of-open.

In 2014, we will

• Launch our third round of facilitated courses in March. Sign up to be notified when registration opens
• Revamp the School of Open landing page to better reflect our multi-layered activity
• Build out courses in different languages. So far volunteers have expressed interest in translating courses into Spanish, Romanian, Hindi, Swedish, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, French, Arabic, German, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew… yes, we’ve got our work cut out for us!
• Expand current training programs to other regions; for example, we hope to have similar programs to School of Open Kenya in place in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania
• Start new courses and training programs in South Africa, Colombia, Uruguay, El Salvador, Argentina, and more!
• Collaborate with our fellow open organizations such as OKFN, Mozilla, Wikimedia, P2PU, and more!
• Do more research! And completing a report of our findings with the OER Research Hub
• Get more SOO courses adopted as part of formal university courses
• Secure professional development credit for teachers/librarians taking Copyright 4 Educators in Australia (and elsewhere)
• Collaborate with the California School Librarians Association (CSLA) to increase CC and OER education in K-12 schools!


Fireworks / Jack-Benny / CC BY-SA

• Run more workshops, especially one for SOO volunteers to get together and grow their respective projects
• Take more pictures. We didn’t have enough this year!

And I could go on, but I’ll stop there. On behalf of the School of Open community, we wish you a Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!

If you would like to join us in our endeavors to provide free education opportunities on all things open, introduce yourself at the School of Open Google Group, sign up for announcements, and check out a course (or two or three).

About the School of Open

The School of Open is a global community of volunteers focused on providing free education opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and more. Volunteers develop and run online courses, offline workshops, and real world training programs on topics such as Creative Commons licenses, open educational resources, and sharing creative works. The School of Open is coordinated by Creative Commons and P2PU, a peer learning community and platform for developing and running free online courses.