I recently spoke with Larry Cooperman, director of OpenCourseWare at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Larry also serves on the boards of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and the African Virtual University. I asked Larry about UC Irvine’s new OpenChem project. Why, in the middle of such excitement over MOOCs, would the Department of Chemistry and … Read More “OpenChem, Open Curriculum, and the Value of Openness”
Ada Lovelace / Kaldari / CC0 Ada Lovelace — widely considered the first computer programmer — famously said, “I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.” That quotation brings to mind the axiom that a … Read More “Ada Lovelace Day: Women, Tech, and OER”
Download press release (PDF) Mountain View, CA and Cambridge, MA — Creative Commons and the OpenCourseWare Consortium announce the formation of a task force to determine how open educational resources (OER) can support the success of girls and women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in support of the Equal Futures Partnership, announced on September … Read More “Using Free and Open Educational Resources to Support Women and Girls in STEM”
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 … Read More “Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly receives President's Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence”
In As Colleges Make Courses Available Free Online, Others Cash In the New York Times writes about how universities are funding OpenCourseWare programs as well as how businesses have sprung up around CC licensed Open Educational Resources (OER) from such programs. Regarding the latter, our CEO is quoted: On a philosophical level, the idea of … Read More “OpenCourseWare economics in the New York Times”
The Center for Social Media at AU has released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare. From the press release, “OpenCourseWare, the Web-based publication of academic course content launched in 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been lauded for making college-level courses available to anyone anywhere in the world … Read More “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare”
Emulating MIT and a host of other OCW institutions, the Stanford School of Engineering has jumped on the OER bandwagon by releasing ten of its courses online in multiple formats. The pilot open courseware portal, known as Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), is Stanford’s first move towards offering full-length course videos and other materials online for … Read More “Stanford Engineering Tries its Hand at OCW”