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.

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 better look out, that this will be threatening to their business model, and I’ve never really felt that until the last six months. The pace of change in open education is qualitatively different than it was even a few months ago.”

Carson argues that MIT’s work is merely a necessary transitory experiment. It only puts classes and course material online, but you still have to watch, frequently from the back of the room, as the professor lectures students. He compares it to Wikipedia. MIT’s videos and materials provide deep references on a subject — but not the actual courses themselves.

Carson is a big fan of Schmidt’s work.  At P2PU, they run online courses that can be taught by a peer (you can create your own course), and they heavily promote the social part of learning. They have a peer mentor program to help students get through their courses and have the most users teaching web development courses, although Schmidt says they’ll be doing less of that. Schmidt believes that even with all the OER in the world, the way people learn is by being excited about it, by making things (even if it is just a blog post) and working together.

“The things I care most about is collaborative skills, are you a good communicator, can you get stuff done?” Schmidt says. “I think that’s the number one thing that isn’t being assessed anywhere that is super important. That’s what you ask when someone wants a job from you: do they get stuff done.”

Carson likes Schmidt’s focus on community, recognition and content because he argues it is more important to discover successful learning techniques rather than merely sign up 100,000 students online. He sees promoting big-sized classes as a way to bring attention to the issue.

“I think one of the higher level struggles these MOOCs are injecting themselves into is to change the way higher education as it is practiced on campus,” Carson said. “It is an opportunity to show faculty members different ways the Internet can support learning.”

And what exactly is the problem all these groups are trying to solve? It’s the sudden acceleration of global higher education demand.

“If you look at the scope and scale of the educational need in the world we’re going to need all of our educational systems firing on all cylinders to come close to even meeting the educational demand emerging in the world,” Carson said. “You could offer a thousand courses enrolling a 100,000 students each and you would not even be scratching the surface of the need in India and China and other developing regions. So we need these educational techniques to solve this problem.”

It took 11 years to get from the launch of OpenCourseWare to the point where a Stanford professor would walk away from a tenure position to launch another online learning venture. So how long will it take to build this next phase? For computer science, experiments like Thrun’s suggest that it may not take that long. Other types of courses Schmidt describes as important don’t yet exist.  And P2PU is still a relatively small community of around 30,000 members. Other countries have small experiments building OER and digital courses using high tech solutions like 3-D simulations, but no strong business model to scale their open efforts.

“We probably haven’t fully made the transition to digitally native pedagogies and learning approaches,” Carson said. “The first generation of distance learning is basically an attempt to move the classroom online, and I think that part of the scalable learning of these massive courses is the breakdown of that model.”

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 of a university course was being rapidly commoditized by technology,” DeMillo said in the interview with New York Times reporter Tamar Lewin. “If you [college professor] think your value is in 13 weeks of lectures, then exams, it’s true that that’s probably not going to be as valuable in the future.”

• GO STRAIGHT TO THE SOURCE. When faced with a huge drop in enrollment in the computer science program at Georgia Tech after the dot-com bust, DeMillo had to find a way to lure students back at a time when everyone believed tech jobs would be outsourced to other countries.  Rather than confer with the insular academic community, DeMillo looked out to the real world for advice. He spoke to dozens of video game companies about what they were looking for in computer science grads. “They said they needed people who not only know the technology but were skilled in the art of storytelling, the narrative arc,” he told the Times. Armed with this knowledge, he reconfigured the computer science department to allow students to choose two “interdisciplinary threads,” like computing and media. The lesson? “What engineers are good at is out-of-the-box solutions, prototyping, and not waiting for a big system change to make an improvement.”

• THE FUTURE IS WIDE OPEN. With more than 120,000 students signed up for Stanford’s online course, more open education sources being added to the list, a new way of building a portfolio through badges, and a growing movement to deconstruct higher education, the fate of the university as we know it is unknown. “The only thing we can be sure of, here in 2011, is that there’s going to be a wave of innovation over the next century, and 100 years from now, higher education won’t look the same,” DeMillo said.
• LOOK FORWARD. Rather than insisting on adhering to age-old traditions, college presidents must find ways to set these institutions on the road to innovation. “Sometimes you have to be a chief executive officer, make priorities and set a direction that’s different from where you were going before,” DeMillo said. Especially now with the crippled U.S. economy, universities must find ways to add value to students’ prospects apart from what they could find on their own.

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.
4. OER Glue: Still under development, OER Glue will be a site to watch. The Utah-based startup is building a browser-based tool that will allow students and teachers to “glue” together OER resources online. Rather than having to copy-and-paste resources into a new setting, OER Glue will reuse and integrate resources.

1. iUniv: iUniv is a Japanese startup that is building web and mobile apps to support and make social video and audio OCW content. Resources can be shared to Twitter, Facebook, and Evernote so that students can actively engage in discussions around OCW content.
2. OCWSearch: OCW Search is a search engine dedicated, as the name suggests, to helping learners find OCW content. The project is, unfortunately, no longer under development, but it does index ten universities’ OCW content, including MIT, Notre Dame, and The Open University UK.
3. Smarthistory: Smarthistory is a free and open multimedia website that demonstrates how very heavy, pricey, and obsolete the traditional art history textbook is.
4. CK-12: The CK-12 Foundation’s Flexbook platform provides free, collaboratively-built and openly-licensed digital textbooks for K-12. Much of the content is standards based.
5. Flat World Knowledge: This is a college textbook publisher whose books are published under an open license. This allows professors to customize the books they order – edit, add to, mix-up – or use as-is. Students can access the books online for free or can pay for print-on-demand and audiobook versions.
6. Connextions: Connextions is a repository of educational content, containing over 17,000 openly licensed learning modules.

If you know of any other great OER and OCW resources, please let us know in the comments!

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.