Ols

In 2005, COSL engaged in a somewhat unsuccessful effort to bring social study groups to MIT OpenCourseWare. I’ve always been disappointed with how the project sputtered and ended. See, for example, the way the Discussion Group page for Linear Algebra looked back in 2005 on archive.org. Our analytics showed that fewer than 1 in 10 people who visited the Discussion Group page ever clicked on the link to visit the Open Learning Support study group. For a project where critical mass is the key to success, this was deadly. Aside from the link being in the same color as the text on the page, I’ve often wondered if the bullet list on the page scared people off a bit: ...

Our annual conference (which several of you attended last year, thanks!) is back. Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education will take place September 28 - 30, 2005 in beautiful Logan, Utah. I’m *really* excited about the conference this year. A few highlights: Keynote speakers include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information, etc.) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin, etc.) and one other (but we can’t say who yet). The Hewlett Foundation will be holding its annual open education fundees meeting in conjunction with the conference, which will bring several super interesting participants to the conference Finally, the group of universities that recently met at MIT to discuss their OpenCourseWare projects will be meeting again in conjunction with the conference, which will bring even more people doing really excellent open education work I’ll be able to say more later, but this is going to be an absolutely awesome conference. I hope you come! More details are available on the conference website. Registration isn’t open yet, but I’m so excited I just had to share…

The OSLO Engineering Team today released a new version of the OLS software. The update includes a number of new features based on user feedback and requests: Link to MIT/OCW Materials: Forums now contain a convienent link to the MIT/OCW materials, making it easier for you to reference the materials while participating in the forums. RSS Feeds: RSS feeds are now available for OLS News and Forums to help keep people up to date on the latest postings. See the FAQ for more details about this new option. OLS User Highlight: Particular OLS user profiles can now be highlighted on the front page (Thanks Jamie) Source Code in the Body of Posts: It is now possible to include programming / source code in the body of a post and preserve the layout by using an HTML tag. Total Number of Posts: Total number of posts are now reported on the right of every page to give a better indication of how the community is growing. Vote For Course List Update: The course list in the Vote for new courses section has been updated to include the latest releases by MIT’s OCW team. MIT Course Numbers: Course numbers have been added to the title of forums, making it easier to identify particular courses.

So today I was stumbling around the OLS site and found the following exchange. This is it… this is what Open Learning Support is about. autounfocus readers may find this boring or even lame, but I’m just so excited to see an instance of OLS facilitating the kind of interaction we intended that I just had to make a post…

Our Open Learning Support pilot project went live this morning. There are now seven MIT OpenCourseWare “courses” pointing to OLS communities: Linear Algebra Introduction to Computers and Engineering Problem Solving Introduction to Algorithms Introduction to Optimization Electricity and Magnetism Intermediate Applied Microeconomics Real Estate Finance and Investment You can also visit the OLS homepage at http://ols.usu.edu/. We’re really excited for today to finally come, and we’re hoping that OLS will have a huge impact on learning around the globe. ...

This is a draft of a book chapter explaining the theoretical foundations (at a high level) of our Open Learning Support project. Attempts to explain the why and how of informal self-organinzing learning communities in under 4000 words. ...

Found this fabulous analysis of group size as it relates to group cohesion, satisfaction, etc. via Seb’s weblog. Very nice. I’m interested in how this may change online, or not, and what the role of weak ties is here…