Ocw

BYU Independent Study (BYU IS) has launched its opencourseware pilot - http://ocw.byu.edu! University Courses Public Speaking (TMA 150) Personal Finance (BUSM 418) Cooking in the Home (SFL 110) High School Courses United States Government and Citizenship (GOVT 45) World Geography: The Forces That Shape Our World (GEOG 41) Earth Science, Part 1 (EARTH 41) The pilot includes three university-level courses and three high school-level courses (BYU IS offers 250 university-level courses online for credit and another 250 high school-level courses online for credit). The courses in BYU IS OCW are content-complete - that is, they are the full courses as delivered online without the need of additional textbooks or other materials (only graded assessments have been removed). ...

About a year ago, I finished 2005-2012: The OpenCourseWars, and thought it quite a fun exercise to try to forecast where things are headed. A few months ago Trey called me a futurist, and I chuckled. Then the Deseret News called me Nostradamus, and I cringed. Perhaps I let what others say about me influence me too much, but I have been spending more and more time thinking about the future of the movement. ...

The Brigham Young University David O. McKay School of Education’s Open Learning project has joined the OCW Consortium! We’ve only published two courses to date, but more are coming. We’re still in pilot mode, so if you find anything not working or looking out of sorts, please let me know!

John said that a prophet hath no honour in his own country. While USU OCW has earned international attention in some of the world’s greatest media outlets, it has only just this week hit USU’s own news service, as they recognize in the story OCW Receiving National, International Recognition. It’s great to see the institution paying some attention to this wonderful program. While the administration may not know it, according to Google USU OCW is the 4th most useful / important / interesting thing happening at USU, only ranking behind the university home page, the athletics page, and the extension page. No USU college or department outranks USU OCW in the eyes of Google. Therefore no USU college or department outranks OCW in the eyes of millions of individuals around the world who depend on Google to help it understand what is useful, interesting, and important. ...

Chris Lott’s recent post Open Content is So, Like, Yesterday has earned him Stephen’s attention and misinterpretation. Well, that’s happened to many of us. =) I want to remix a little of his post and provide some supporting comments: Good open content is a vital part of creating a vital open education apparatus… Content is just one piece of the open education mosaic that is worth a lot less on its own than in concert with practices, context, artifacts. ...

A good friend suggested to me yesterday that openly publishing my course materials may not be possible at BYU due to the Brigham Young University Intellectual Property Policy. Curious that such a restriction on my ability to openly share my course materials might exist, I explored the policy in more detail. Here’s what I found. 1. Course materials are Creative Works as defined by the IPP: Intellectual properties are divided into two categories: technical works and creative works. Technical works include intellectual properties that are generally of a scientific, engineering, or technical nature - such as patentable or unpatentable inventions, devices, machines, processes, methods, and compositions; computer software; and university collections. Creative works include all intellectual properties not covered in technical works that are of an artistic, scholarly, instructional, assessment, or entertainment nature. Examples of creative works might include creative productions, such as works of art or design; musical scores; books, poems, and other types of scholarly or creative writings; films; video and audio recordings; and instructional materials, such as textbooks and multimedia programs. All computer software is included in technical works except that which is clearly developed for entertainment or for instructional purposes, e.g., electronic textbooks and textbook supplements, classroom and self-study tutorials. (Section I Para 1) ...

If you believe, like many, that academic publishers like Elsevier are evil, you may want to upgrade your opinion of Elsevier itself to “small but definitely non-zero chance that this organization is not evil.” According to a joint release from MIT and Elsevier: In a move to encourage open education, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Elsevier have agreed to make available figures and text selections from any of Elsevier’s more than 2,000 journal titles for use on OCW. As a result of this landmark agreement, select Elsevier content can now be included within the open access OCW course materials - to be freely downloaded, used and shared under a Creative Commons license. ...

Thought you all might be interested in a little experiment I’m trying in republishing OCW materials in Wordpress - http://newmediaocw.wordpress.com/. There’s a ton we can do here with custom themes and plugins that would be really cool. Wouldn’t have the power of something like eduCommons, but would be much simpler to use, too. Let me know what you think!

You may be somewhat surprised to hear that talk on the UNESCO IIEP list, set up for the discussion of open educational resources, has temporarily turned to the topic of open versus free versus libre again. :) Here is my contribution to the conversation, in which I quote and than “adapt” John Adams… ...

Derek Keats, who I greatly respect and admire, responded to my earlier post with this reply: ...