open education resources

Is Peer Input as Important as Content for Online Learning?

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, Tech Tools, MIT, MIT OpenCourseWare, MOOC, open education resources, Open Source, Stanford

March 27, 2012 | 3:52 PM | By Tina Barseghian

How Open Education Can Transform Learning

Flickr: NP_Josh

As the open education movement grows, the ripple effects of what it means for teachers to take control of what they teach is being witnessed across all spectrums in education. Customizable content, sharing and becoming part of a community, and deconstructing entrenched ideologies about what constitutes quality learning materials — these are just a few paths that the open education movement is creating.

At the Big Ideas Fest in December, we spoke to stakeholders in open education about how it’s transforming learning.

For some, like Una Daly, associate director of Open College Textbooks the movement is inevitable. Open education is a natural progression in the freeing and sharing of information on the Internet. “Open education is an evolutionary step in making sharing easier for students teachers and public,” she said.

Neeru Khosla, founder of CK12, a nonprofit open education source for free Web-based content in the form of digital “Flexbooks,” points out that customizable content allows educators to meet each of their students’ specific needs, unlike the rigid text format.

But for public school teacher Constance Moore, who teaches art in Oakland, Calif., the logistics of finding open education resources online is a major challenge. “You can’t get online,” she said. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Big Ideas Fest, open education resources, open textbooks

January 25, 2012 | 9:53 AM | By Tina Barseghian

How to Create Your Own Textbook — With or Without Apple

Flickr: Marquette La

By Dolores Gende

Apple’s announcement last week about its new iBooks2 and authoring app created big waves in education circles. But smart educators don’t necessarily need Apple’s slick devices and software to create their own books. How educators think of content curation in the classroom is enough to change their reliance on print textbooks.

As the open education movement continues to grow and become an even more rich trove of resources, teachers can use the content to make their own interactive textbooks. It might seem daunting, but the availability of quality materials online and the power of tapping into personal learning networks should make it easier.

Here’s how to create a digital textbook and strategies for involving the students in its development in three steps.

1. AGGREGATION. Gather all your sources of information. The best way to aggregate content is through social bookmarking with great online tools like Delicious and Diigo, which allow you to bookmark sites that can be seen and shared online. As Diigo’s web site explains it, the site “allows teachers to highlight critical features within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves. (Watch this video to see how to do this step-by-step.)

Teachers can work with colleagues within their subject area departments and beyond the walls of the classroom to aggregate resources through social bookmarking. Invaluable sources of Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools, digital textbooks, open education resources, open textbooks

December 13, 2011 | 10:44 AM | By Tina Barseghian

California Bill Pushes for Free Online College Books

Flickr:Albertogp123

Every year, the average college student pays about $1,100 for textbooks alone. At this point, most textbooks assigned by college professors average around $150 each. That’s almost the same cost as the course itself at California community colleges.

But the free, open-content movement that’s been percolating for the past few years may change all that for the three million college students in California.

At a time when rising tuition costs are compelling students to reconsider buying college texts or even rethink the value of a college degree, the California State Legislature is pushing for colleges to use open education resources in the form of free online textbooks instead of print books as a means of saving students money.

“We need to think of a model that will completely change the way we do things.”

State Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg is proposing a bill today that will allocate $25 million of state coffers to create 50 free online college book titles that teachers can use, remix, add to, or edit as they see fit. The bill establishes the online California Digital Open Source Library, which will house the 50 most commonly used books for required lower-division courses. Similar to Flat World Knowledge, students and teachers will be able to access and adapt the texts online for free, or pay $20 for either printed form or interactive app form for tablets or mobile devices (think Kno or Inkling).

The bill calls for a request for proposal (RFP) to be submitted from all content providers, electronic platform providers, as well as publishers, that will fall under a Creative Commons license, which means

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Higher Education, open education resources

November 28, 2011 | 10:12 AM | By Tina Barseghian

What Colleges Must Do to Stay Relevant

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

November 18, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By Tina Barseghian

The Khan Academy Opens Its Virtual Doors — Carefully

The Khan Academy "Knowledge Map," which suggests working exercises, will be made available to crowd-sourced videos chosen by the Khan Academy.

As of today, there are more than 2,700 videos on the Khan Academy site. All of them have been created by Salman Khan himself, with the exception of those produced by the SmartHistory team who Khan hired a few months ago.

Over the course of a few short years, Khan has accumulated a vast library of education videos that are now used in schools and homes across the country.

But no man is an island, as they say, and Khan is opening up his academy – at least in part – to the great Internet expanse.

“We want to expose our tools so that everyone can use them to help kids learn at their own pace.”

In the very foreseeable future, teachers will be able to upload their own videos to the Khan Academy, but also be able to create their own “knowledge maps” or repositories of content for their classes, using videos – within or outside of the Khan Academy – and all of Khan’s analytics, and reporting tools, in order to customize their own curricula.

Khan describes it this way:

“In the first iteration, let’s say you teach gender studies at U.C. Berkeley. You could put up your own videos, exercises, and everything you want for the class. Plus, you could leverage all the tools Continue reading →