MIT OpenCourseWare

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Is Peer Input as Important as Content for Online Learning?

April 24, 2012 | 1:01 PM | By

Flickr: Incase

By Nathan Maton

Back in 2001, MIT launched OpenCourseWare, a bold idea to put world-class MIT professors’ lectures, syllabi and resources online to the world for free. Today, Open Education Resources (OER) industry leaders are arguing that the free content is only the starting point.

The next stage of the open education movement has evolved into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) — the key word being “massive,” as in drawing tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Last fall, Sebastian Thrun’s Artificial Intelligence course enrolled 160,000 students and Thrun recently gave up tenure at Stanford to start Udacity, a company that will offer more MOOCs.

But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content.

“It was totally clear to me [several years ago] that content is only the starting point,” Schmidt said at recently at a SXSW session. “The really exciting stuff is going to be the learning, the assessments and the stuff that you need the content for. In a way, we started P2PU because institutions weren’t doing it. How do we build community around it and recognition for this open content is my question.”

The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to.

“It was totally clear to me that content is only the starting point.”

You’d expect MIT to tout its content as the solution. But that’s not how Steve Carson, director of external affairs for OpenCourseWare, describes the benefits of their project.

“The most exciting thing is that the last six months of open education have been spectacularly disruptive,” Carson says. “It was kind of a sleepy enterprise for the last 10 years where MIT was doing its thing and there were other projects doing their thing. It was all good and there were positive global benefits, but in the past 10 years I’ve heard people say campus-based education Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, MIT, MIT OpenCourseWare, MOOC, open education resources, Open Source, Stanford

What Colleges Must Do to Stay Relevant

November 28, 2011 | 10:12 AM | By

Flickr: J. Gresham

For many Americans, going to college has been the next natural step after graduating from high school. A college degree has served not just as a status symbol, but also proof that graduates have mastered a subject and can put the knowledge they’ve acquired in school to practice.

But the value of a college degree is being questioned by those who wonder if there’s a better alternative. With free, high-quality education available online, and a growing new movement around nontraditional ways of earning credit for expertise through digital badges (a digital portfolio of sorts that includes credit for online courses, traditional college courses, and workplace achievements), colleges must find new ways of staying relevant.

Distilling a recent New York Times interview with Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities, a few imperatives are becoming clear.

  • INFORMATION IS PRICELESS. With MIT’s OpenCourseWare – the university’s classes offered online for free – as well as a long list of other quality free educational resources, the public perception of what holds value in education has changed. Facts and how-to’s are freely available to anyone with Internet access. So why pay upwards of $40,000 a year in tuition? “OpenCourseWare was an important signpost that hammered home the point that the content Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, badges, Higher Education, MIT OpenCourseWare, open education resources, Uncollege

10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should)

May 5, 2011 | 2:11 PM | By

Horla Varlan

This week, the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of OpenCourseWare. The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the materials from all 2,000 of the university’s courses on the Web.

With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described in her opening remarks at yesterday’s meeting as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: “the tradition of the global intellectual commons.”

We have looked here before at how OCW has shaped education in the last ten years, but in many ways much of the content that has been posted online remains very much “Web 1.0.” That is, while universities have posted their syllabi, handouts, and quizzes online, there has not been — until recently — much “Web 2.0″ OCW resources — little opportunity for interaction and engagement with the material.

But as open educational resources and OCW increase in popularity and usage, there are a number of new resources out there that do offer just that. You probably already know about: Khan Academy and Wikipedia, for example. But in the spirit of 10 years of OCW, here’s a list of 10 cool OER and OCW resources that you might not know about, but should know:

  1. P2PU: The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project in which anyone can participate. Volunteers facilitate the courses, but the learners are in charge. P2PU leverages both open content and the open social web, with a model for lifelong learning.
  2. OpenStudy: OpenStudy is a social learning network where independent learners and traditional students can come together in a massively-multiplayer study group. Through OpenStudy, learners can find other working in similar content areas in order to support each other and answer each others’ questions. OpenStudy supports a number of study groups, including those focused on several MIT OCW courses.
  3. NITXY: NIXTY is building a learning management platform that supports open education resources. Rather than an LMS that closes off both academic resources and academic progress, NIXTY is designed to support open courses so that schools, teachers, and students’ work is not necessarily closed off from the rest of the Web. Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, MIT OpenCourseWare, open, open educational resources

10 Ways OpenCourseWare Has Freed Education

April 18, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By

Flickr:CriCristina

This month marks the tenth anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare, the university’s initiative to provide free and open access to its core academic content — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from over 2000 MIT course.

The decision by the MIT faculty in 2001 to allow anyone to use their course content was a seminal move,  one that had a profound effect on democratizing education. (You can read the original New York Times story here.) Since then, over 100 million people have accessed MIT’s materials.

In honor of ten years of MIT OCW, here are 10 ways in which this important Open CourseWare initiative has changed education.

  1. CREATING THE MOLD. While MIT OpenCourseWare remains the flagship institution and initiative, it has been joined by multiple other colleges and universities that now make their course content available for learners. These include Brigham Young University, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, Notre Dame and UC Irvine — and that’s just in the United States.
  2. GOING GLOBAL. In addition to American universities that now make their course content available, universities all over the world follow suit. But just as importantly, learners all over the world have access to this content. Statistics from MIT’s program show that less than 1% of those who access the university’s content are actually doing so from MIT. And almost 60% of those visitors to the site are outside the U.S.
  3. DEMOCRATIZING HIGH-QUALITY EDUCATION. The idea of making content available online means that the sorts of information that are part of a university education can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. Despite the hoops and hurdles necessary for gaining admission to a school like MIT, the course content is actually accessible to anyone.
  4. ALLOWING CUSTOMIZATION. MIT OCW is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-Non-Commercial License. That means that teachers and learners are able to share and remix the content that’s available.
  5. ENCOURAGING SHARING. Do educators have an ethical responsibility to share? Open CourseWare reminds us that a large part of our role as educators is to share knowledge, and we should work to remove the barriers that make that possible.
  6. EMPOWERING EDUCATORS. Even with the best of intentions, sharing content isn’t possible without the framework in place to make that happen. Open CourseWare efforts give educators the tools necessary to spread their teaching materials globally.
  7. PROVIDING VALUABLE CONTENT. Want to learn about a particular topic? Want to see what the professors at the premier institutions in the world include in a class on astrophysics, calculus, engineering? Open CourseWare means that learners are able to follow their intellectual pursuits, without having to worry about college applications, tuition, course requirements, and the like.
  8. ENABLING LIFELONG LEARNING. Most of those who take advantage of Open CourseWare aren’t enrolled in college. These are independent learners who are not working towards a particular degree, but are committed to lifelong learning.
  9. REINFORCING THE COLLEGE EXPERIENCE. Open CourseWare doesn’t negate the college degree necessarily. But it does show that universities can post their content online with the assurance that the college campus experience is, in fact, worth paying for. That you can access MIT course content online has done nothing at all to diminish the value of an MIT degree.
  10. DEMONSTRATING THE NEED FOR MORE. Despite the massive amount of content that’s available online, it isn’t really enough. In the past ten years, we’ve seen a number of other efforts grow up alongside open courseware, aiming to establish a community of learners who are all working through these same topics — whether they’re students or independent learners. Examples include OpenStudy, a project that grew out of Georgia Tech and Emory University and now runs a social learning network that supports Open CourseWare and open educational resources. Learning isn’t a solitary act.
FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, MIT OpenCourseWare, open courseware, open educational resources, Open Source

What’s Next for Open-Source Education?

February 23, 2011 | 4:30 PM | By

Ten years ago, the concept of a university openly sharing its prized (and expensive) curriculum for free with anyone who was interested, especially one has highly regarded as M.I.T., was unheard of. But in the past decade MIT OpenCourseWare has paved the way for the open-source content movement.

On their tenth anniversary, ReadWriteWeb enumerates what the next decade will bring for the organization. Highlights: the inevitable app, reaching out to high schools, and collaborative studying.

“It’s quite humbling for us to see the impact OpenCourseWare has had,” says Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, Chair of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee and a member of the original faculty panel that first proposed the program. “We set out to create a resource other faculty could draw on to improve their classes, and tapped into a much larger need around the world. Millions of people have come to the site for the chance to learn, even without credit offered or access to faculty.”

Read more here.

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Source