I can’t make a “formal announcement” yet, as we’re still working on the official name (probably Open Sustainable Education) and other details, but I can safely say that we now have administrative approval and pilot funding in place for an OpenCourseWare type project (ala MIT) at USU. The USU collection will be specifically strong in agriculture (i.e., irrigation engineering, orchard development, etc. — Go Aggies!) but include resources from other university courses as well. Formal announcement coming soon…
Our focus in developing the model has been economics, or trying to put together a project that meaningfully contributes open resources of the highest quality possible while costing the least amount of money. If we succeed as we intend, not only will release a wide variety of resources to the world but we’ll also release a model for doing low-cost OCW style projects together with open source infrastructure for doing them.
Of course, there will be support for social interaction around these materials via our OLS project (the OLS pilot with MIT/OCW opens to the public on April 5; more on that soon).
I’m really excited. If any of this sounds like fun, don’t forget the two open faculty positions in our department!