MIT OpenCourseWare Recognized by the AAAS

July 29th, 2010 by scarson

Open education site noted for providing exceptional online materials.

Cambridge, MA, July 29, 2010 – The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced today MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) has been named as a recipient of the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE). MIT OpenCourseWare is Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s groundbreaking effort to share the core academic content—including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams—from the entire MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. The site currently includes materials from more than 2,000 MIT courses and has received more than 68 million visits since OCW’s launch in 2002.

The Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) was designed to promote exceptional online materials that are available free of charge to science educators. The acronym SPORE refers to a reproductive element adapted to develop, often in less than ideal conditions, into something new. The winning projects are intended to be the seed of progress in education, even in the face of formidable challenges to educational innovation. Science publishes an article about each winning project by the project’s developer. The article about the OCW site, which is called “MIT OpenCourseWare: Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds,” will be published in the July 30 issue of Science.

“We’re trying to advance science education,” says Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science. “This competition will provide much-needed recognition for innovators in the field whose efforts promise significant benefits for students and for science literacy in general. The publication in Science of an article on each Web site will help guide educators around the globe to valuable free resources that might otherwise be missed.”

In responding to the announcement, Cecilia d’Oliveira said, “This is a wonderful recognition of the thousands of voluntary contributions of materials from MIT community members that make MIT OpenCourseWare possible. These contributions are a dramatic demonstration of MIT’s widely held commitment to knowledge as a public good.”

OCW materials are used by faculty, students and independent learners worldwide for a wide variety of purposes. Educators use the materials to improve courses and curricula at their schools; students supplement materials provided for their courses with the content from MIT; and independent learners study for pleasure or in the context of their professional activities.

In the past ten years, OCW has collected hundreds of user stories illustrating the impact of the resource. One such example is Indian educator Prabhakar Krishnamurthy, who describes how OCW’s Applied Operations Research and Quantitative Techniques course has influenced how he teaches his own course. “After three years of use in the classroom now I can say it is a ‘window to the world of best learning practices.’ Personally I myself benefited from the information and it led to significant changes in the way I co-learn with my students.”

About the AAAS

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal Science as well as Science Translational Medicine and Science Signaling. AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The non-profit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy; international programs; science education; and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.

About OpenCourseWare

An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials – often including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, and exams – organized as courses. While OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiatives typically do not provide a degree, credit, or certification, or access to instructors, the materials are made available under open licenses for use and adaptation by educators and learners around the world.

About MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare makes the materials used in the teaching of substantially all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate courses—more than 2,000 in all—available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. OCW receives an average of 1.5 million web site visits per month from more than 215 countries and territories worldwide. To date, more than 65 million visitors have accessed the free MIT educational materials on the site or in translation.

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Reflections on a Year

July 26th, 2010 by admin

(from Mary Lou Forward)

This week marks the end of my first year as Executive Director of the OCW Consortium.  This past year’s staff efforts could be characterized as building and connecting. We’ve added staff from around the world to focus on the needs of our members, promote openness in education with new audiences, and generally advance the movement.  This geographic spread of our staff – Korea, Mexico, South Africa and the US – means that you can find consortium staff online and working with nearly 24 hour per day coverage.  Many of you have had the opportunity to connect with staff and Board members this year, and we’re looking forward to more connections over the coming year.  We hope you’ve been enjoying the new newsletter format and the monthly webinar offerings.  If you have news items or suggestions, please let us know through This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in news, ocw consortium, organizational planning, staff | No Comments »

Help build a history of OCW

July 22nd, 2010 by scarson

(Posted by Steve Carson)

As we prepare for next year’s OCWC Global Meeting in Cambridge, MA (May 4-6, 2011), where we will celebrate 10 years of OCW, one thing we’d like to build is a comprehensive timeline of OCW-related events—site launches, organizational milestones, traffic levels, etc—representing all of the many global contributors to the movement.  And we’d like your help doing it.

As a start and a workspace, I’ve posted the timeline I pulled together for the MIT OpenCourseWare Milestone Celebration in 2007 on the Consortium wiki.  I invite the community to log onto the wiki and add additional events and items (I obviously have to cover 2008-2011 still as well), or if you are note comfortable editing the wiki, simply send me an e-mail (scarson at ocwconsortium dot org) with your items and I will add them in.

Looking forward to a great celebration in 2011.

Posted in OCWC Conference, evaluation, ocw, ocw consortium, ocwc, opencourseware | No Comments »

Upcoming Webinar Schedule Jul. 2010 ~ Sept. 2010

June 24th, 2010 by admin

The schedule for the OCW Consortium upcoming monthly webinar series is as follows:

“Automated Video Transcription” by Mitja Jermol from Videolectures.net. July 1, 10AM EDT (UTC/GMT -4 hours). Mitja will talk about the new automated video transcription technology which will enable OCW videos to be more searchable, easier to be translated, and more effective in pedagogical utility. If you have been wondering about what to do in order to increase discoverability for your video projects, please come and join in the conversation.

“Using Creative Commons for Educational Content” by Lila Bailey from Creative Commons.
August 5, 10AM EDT. This would be a great primer for those interested in using Creative Commons for educational contents. Lila, Counsel for Creative Commons, will cover the basics of using Creative Commons for different situations.

“Roundtable Discussion: Developing Open License Guidelines for OCW Content”
September 2, 10AM EDT. As a follow-up to the August webinar, this webinar is offered as a discussion for achieving consensus in the community on how to use open licenses. We will take a look at best practices and pressing issues, and start a conversation to an action plan that the community can collaborate on.

Webinars are held on the first Thursday of each month. There is no need to register. You can join at http://breezemeeting.asu.edu/ocwc. A headset is recommended if you would like to participate in the discussion.

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Posted in opencourseware | 1 Comment »

Open.Michigan position

June 9th, 2010 by scarson

Open.Michigan just posted a new position for an Open Education Coordinator. This position would engage the University of Michigan (U-M) campus and its peer institutions on open education and cultivate a robust community of practitioners in this area, from content producers to instructors to librarians to researchers and beyond. This individual would build a network of like-minded educators on campus, share knowledge and resources with this group, and bring critical needs assessment back to the Open.Michigan and U-M staff in order to improve infrastructure and support for open education activities.

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This week in OER

June 1st, 2010 by admin

Developments and events in the broader OER community are as dynamic as ever. It would be impossible to have an update of all that’s going on, so here’s a quick update on what’s happening this week.

The Catalyst Campaign: Donate Now to Help Fund CC’s Catalyst Grants
Creative Commons launched the Catalyst Campaign today to raise money for the Catalyst Grants. The Catalyst Grants will make it possible for individuals and organizations to harness the power of Creative Commons. A grant might enable a group in a developing country to research how Open Educational Resources can positively impact its community. Another could support a study of entrepreneurs using Creative Commons licenses to create a new class of socially responsible businesses. Anyone may apply for a Catalyst Grant, which ranges from $1,000-$10,000. The goal is to raise $100,000. You can make a donation at www.creativecommons.org. If you are interested in applying for a grant, you can find more information here.

CC Asia Conference 2010
CC Asia Conference will be held from June 4-5 in Seoul, Korea. You can find more information here. The theme for this year is ‘Open for Innovation’.

Universidad 2.0 se abre a Latinoamérica
Universidad 2.0 offers workshops and roundtable discussions on OpenCourseWare and P2P production. The conference is held from June 4-5 in Bogota, Columbia. Live streaming is available here.

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NJIT OpenCourseWare Launches

April 29th, 2010 by scarson

I had a wonderful time yesterday visiting with the staff, administration and guests at the New Jersey Institute of Technology during yesterday’s Open U Day. Thanks to Gale Spak and Bill Reynolds for being such wonderful hosts, and for the warm welcome from Don Sebastian, Rich Sweeny, Jim Robertson and others.

I was also thrilled to see the recently launched NJIT OpenCourseWare, which contains 18 video courses and should hit 36 very soon, making it one of the larger collections of video courses in the Consortium. A special shout out to Blake Haggerty, the one-man band that helps faculty get the materials on line.

Congrats to the entire team there and to NJIT for showing institutional commitment at all levels to open sharing. Great to have NJIT as part of the OpenCourseWare community.

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Posted in opencourseware | 2 Comments »

Hewlett OER Grantees Meeting

April 20th, 2010 by Terri Bays

Last week, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation held its annual OER Grantees Meeting at Yale University. Several OCW Consortium members were represented there to learn about Hewlett’s plans for moving forward in the arena of Open Educational Resources. An added bonus was the word coming from Hal Plotkin (Senior Policy Advisor to Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter in the United States Department of Education), who announced that the Obama Administration will be relying on the Hewlett Foundation as a formal advisor in the creation of structure for US Department of Education grant programs moving forward.

Those plans involve a portfolio focus shifting towards projects that foster “deeper learning.” For Hewlett, deeper learning means increasing economic success and civic engagement by educating students for a changing world and addressing a crisis in schools marked both by the sacrifice of depth for the sake of breadth and by an ever-widening achievement gap. Hewlett’s approach will be two-fold:

For K through Community College

The K through Community College arena remains an under-developed area in the US, given its huge potential for OER deployment. Aiming for the 2017 re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Hewlett will engage the process for developing state-based standards and will enter the federal competition for new assessment processes. In the meantime, Hewlett will focus its advocacy efforts on creating the conditions necessary for change in 2017, including removal of barriers currently blocking the incorporation of open textbooks and curricula.

In order to achieve scale, Hewlett is looking to develop proof points that can be shown to policy makers as evidence that open educational resources really do help achieve deeper learning. OER Research thus will continue to be a funding priority. In addition, Hewlett will be promoting model schools that feature not only the consumption of open resources but the embrace of open pedagogies such as remix and peer-to-peer learning.

Policy change that is unaccompanied by changes in capacity and practice will almost certainly lead to system failures. Mindful of this, Hewlett seeks to fund projects that develop curriculum, tools and training for delivering OER to children and young adults. Partnerships between Hewlett and the open source community will be a significant part of this process.

For Higher Education

Nor is Higher Education being left out of this deeper learning picture. While recognizing that structural differences between Higher Education and K through Community College will prevent direct replication of successful Higher Ed. strategies, Hewlett looks to the Higher Education community for support in areas such as research and staff development.

Additionally, Higher Education continues to contribute to the overall health of the OER movement simply by managing to thrive in this tight economic environment. To capitalize on that contribution, Hewlett will be supporting ongoing policy development in Higher Education that will enable OER to move from the margins of the Higher Education arena to the mainstream. Improvement of communication methods, and particularly the articulation of agreement on core issues, will be the focus of Hewlett’s ongoing strategy of support for Higher Education.

There is great excitement among the Hewlett staff and the OER community about where we are headed together.

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Posted in hewlett, oer, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware, organizational planning, policy | 5 Comments »

Dues, present and future

April 8th, 2010 by scarson

On behalf of the staff and board of the Consortium, I’d like to thank the membership for the smooth introduction of dues as a facet of Consortium membership. While we were pleased and grateful to announce the recent charter sustaining member commitments, we recognize that the majority of members are not in a position to make a commitment at this level. The regular dues payments made by the broader membership, however, are equally important to the ongoing sustainability of the organization and we appreciate the financial support for the Consortium.

The staff and board are committed to continually increasing the value members received for their support, providing better visibility for member websites, more opportunities for best practice exchange, and increased support for workgroups and other member-driven activities. We are also committed to careful and responsible stewardship of the funds provided by members, ensuring the support is wisely invested in the future of the movement. Finally, I’d like to invite the membership to participate in the process of establishing dues levels in the upcoming year. At the last board meeting, the board voted to recommend to the membership that dues for 2011 remain at the 2010 level. The board invites comment on this recommendation which can be sent to the board e-mail list (board at ocwconsortium dot org), and we will take a final vote on dues levels at the Hanoi meeting.

Once again, thanks to the entire community for supporting the Consortium.

Posted in OCWC Board, OCWC Conference, ocw consortium, opencourseware | No Comments »

Kicking off the Strategic Planning Online Discussion

April 5th, 2010 by scarson

Just want to remind the community that we are kicking off the strategic planning online discussion tonight. If you are interested in providing early input for the FY 12-13 OCWC strategic plan, please join the mailing list strategicplan at ocwconsortium dot org.

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