The first meeting to discuss the production of a guideline will take place on the 9th of September at 4PM EDT. The meeting is open to anyone who is willing to contribute to the making of the guidelines by offering expertise on the topic or constantly throwing questions that need to be answered. You can join the meeting at http://breezemeeting.asu.edu/ocwc. If you are very new to using open licenses, please take a look at the recording of Lila’s webinar on Creative Commons at http://www.vimeo.com/14384339 before the meeting. Wayne Mackintosh, Director of OER Foundation will facilitate the meeting. Any inquiry on the meeting should be directed to Meena Hwang at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Sept. Webinar: Creating Guidelines for Open Licenses in OCW
September 6th, 2010 by meenaTIME Magazine selects MIT OpenCourseWare as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010
August 25th, 2010 by scarsonOCW shares honor with LinkedIn, TEDTalks, National Geographic, The Onion, Mayo Clinic and others
CAMBRIDGE, MA, August 25, 2010 –TIME Magazine has named MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu) one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010. Selected by the editors of TIME.com, MIT OpenCourseWare shares the honor with such notable and well-known websites as LinkedIn, Etsy, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, Mint, Groupon, LiveMocha and TEDTalks. Here is the full list of TIME’s 50 Best Websites of 2010.
“It’s truly remarkable to see MIT OpenCourseWare listed beside these other well-known sites,” says Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, Chair of OCW’s Faculty Advisory Committee. “It really speaks to the impact the site is having not only on the individuals who use it, but on the culture of the web as a whole. It highlights the opportunities the Web provides for free and open sharing of knowledge. The MIT community should be very proud.”
This recognition continues a string of recent honors for MIT OpenCourseWare. In July MIT OpenCourseWare was named as a recipient of the prestigious SPORE award from the journal Science, and was featured in that magazine’s July 30th issue. In 2009, OCW’s Highlights for High School portal was named a Landmark Website for Teaching and Learning by the American Association of School Librarians.
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.
WA State Representative sets OER as a public policy goal
August 13th, 2010 by mlforwardReuven Carlyle, Representative from Seattle to the Washington State Legislature, has written an engaging blog on the importance of Open Educational Resources. Standing for re-election in a few months, he is calling on both veteran legislators and new candidates to outline their policy plans. Mr. Carlyle begins the outline of his own policy priorities with the importance of open education and OER in a post from earlier today entitled “Want government reform? Open access to education”. He says:
Yes it’s a movement and yes it has detractors and advocates. Yes it requires a leap of faith that the web has fundamentally changed our world’s view of the power of information for the better and, yes, it requires a belief in the common good over proprietary financial interests.
But of course it’s not just about money, it’s about the core value of access to opportunity for everyone.
Our national needs are radically changing and our bureaucracies, systems and structures are understandably terrified by the challenges. We need to educate more people to higher levels not only through traditionally more, extremely expensive “high demand” static slots paid by taxpayers but through radical approaches to access to information.
Mr. Carlyle goes on to say:
My public policy goal in 2011 and beyond is to ensure that Washington is fully engaged in this movement, leads the effort where it makes sense and tackles the challenges of opening the doors of access to higher education in new and profound ways.
Government reform is a buzzword but we can radically change how we open the doors of access to higher education by making information available in new, bold and creative ways.
You can read the full posting here. If you know of other legislators working on open educational policy, please share!
Running courses openly – fewer problems and more benefits than expected
August 9th, 2010 by Jan Philipp SchmidtThe idea of open teaching — opening access to the course materials and interaction to anyone, not just the enrolled students — seems foreign and a bit wacky to many professors and lecturers. More students sound like more work, less opportunity to engage with each individual student, and the practicalities of facilitating a diverse group of participants using online technologies seems daunting as well. It turns out that those who try it are often surprised that it’s much more rewarding and easier than they thought. Read the rest of this entry »
OCW Consortium Webinar: Using Creative Commons for OCW
August 2nd, 2010 by meenaThe OCW Consortium Webinar in August is on «Using Creative Commons for Open Educational Resources». If you are interested in finding out which Creative Commons license to use for different situations, please join us on August 5 at 10 A.M. EDT. Lila Bailey, Counsel of Creative Commons will give a talk, and a Q&A session will follow. The webinar is open and free to anyone interested in OpenCourseWare. No registration is necessary. You can join the webinar at http://breezemeeting.asu.edu/ocwc.
This webinar will serve as a preliminary session for the roundtable discussion to be held in September. The discussion in September will address the task of creating a guideline for using open licenses in OCW/OER. Many in the community have pointed out the needs of a guideline to be used for various forms of educational material at different levels of education. A working group will soon be formed in order to address such a need. A call for the working group participation will be announced in the next newsletter, so stay tuned!
MIT OpenCourseWare Recognized by the AAAS
July 29th, 2010 by scarsonOpen 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, OCW Executive Director 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.
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 »
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.
Upcoming Webinar Schedule Jul. 2010 ~ Sept. 2010
June 24th, 2010 by adminThe 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.
All content on ocwconsortium.org is licensed under a
US Department of Ed grant priorities include OER
August 6th, 2010 by mlforwardThe US Department of Education has issued a notice of the Secretary’s priorities for discretionary grants, which mentions OER as a priority. The summary states:
“The Secretary of Education proposes priorities that the Department of Education (Department) may use for any appropriate discretionary grant program in fiscal year (FY) 2011 and future years. We take this action to focus Federal financial assistance on expanding the number of programs and projects Department-wide that support activities in areas of greatest educational need. We are establishing these priorities on a Department-wide basis. This action will permit all offices in the Department to use, as appropriate for particular discretionary grant programs, one or more of these priorities in any discretionary grant competition. We also propose definitions of key terms used in these proposed priorities.”
Priority #13 mentions OER as one means of “building capacity for systematic continuous improvement” through increasing productivity.
Approval of this priority list means that production and use of OER as a component of a grant application to an appropriate Department of Education program could be given higher priority for funding than applications without this component.
There is a month long comment period on these proposed priorities. To read the document in its entirety, and for instructions on how to submit comments for consideration, please see the Federal Register at:
www.federalregister.gov/articles/2010/08/05/2010-19296/secretarys-priorities-for-discretionary-grant-programs#h-28
Tags: Department of Education, funding priorities, public comment
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