Courses

The Open Movement and Libraries is a resource-rich course covering a wide range of open topics being offered this fall by Ellyssa Kroski. The course plan linked above is licensed CC By-SA.

I probably would not have named this the ‘Wiley Wiki Design’, but when someone like Leigh names something after you, how do you refuse? =) I’ve been meaning to write a little about this design I’ve been using for the last several years and how it has evolved, but recent proddings by Leigh, Teemu, and Bron have finally gotten me off the virtual starting line. Since Fall 2004 I’ve been running my courses in the open via the wiki at OpenContent (course listing). In the theme of this blog, Iterating Toward Openness, these courses started “basically open” and have become more “completely open” (note more completely open, not actually completely open). What I mean is that the original courses had their syllabus and course content out from behind a password with permissions for people to edit. I was disappointed that, even when you put it in a wiki, students still don’t feel empowered to edit your syllabus. They had little trouble editing the online textbook I wrote for the course, though, which was great. And they all wrote their homework assignments on publicly readable blogs. In one of these early classes Stephen ran one of my student’s assignments in OLDaily, which brought the broader community into the conversation those students were having. Strangely enough, the next week all the students’ writing was longer and more thoughtful. Funny what the pressures of peer review will do… So we might say that these first iterations, the 2004-2006 period, were open in terms of their content and discussions, but only students at USU could really participate in the classes. ...