The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will be funding the OSLO Research Group‘s next two projects. Synopses follow.
Open Learning Support (OLS), our partnership with MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, will build a social infrastructure around the OCW materials, allowing informal study groups to form and enabling learners to provide and receive peer support while using the OCW materials.
EduCommons is our “SourceForge for educational materials” project. We hope that EduCommons will facilitate the development and release of significant new educational materials for years to come, including derivative works based on / localizations of OCW content.
All the projects will be 100% open source. In addition to looking for partners in the traditional OSS fashion, we will also be adding two full-time, benefited programmers to the group to work on these projects (with Brent Lambert, our gifted Chief Technical Architect). A formal announcement will be coming later this week; please contact me if you or someone you know is interested in one of the programmer positions. This also means that, yes, we will finally be having the EduCommons requirements meetings we talked about over the summer (we’ll have them for OLS, too).