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Press Coverage
What folks are saying about COSL
Press Releases
- Utah State University-Based COSL to Host International Conference on "Open Education" (September 13, 2006)
Press Coverage
COSL projects have been the subject of several articles in the local, national, and international press, including:
- Wall Street Journal. (March 28, 2008). Free Online Courses Are Proliferating.
Educators recognized that open-source software, with its emphasis on harnessing the contributions of volunteers to develop and perfect code, was a great model. "Let's try to build on the momentum of open-source" software, David Wiley, an associate professor of instructional technology at Utah State University, recalls of the thinking among academics in 1998 when he joined up.... And in India, a National Knowledge Commission has recommended initiatives that, if implemented, would push India to the forefront of open-source education, says Mr. Wiley, the Utah educator... Then there are issues with overcoming the traditions and entrenched interests of academia, such as the concerns some lecturers have about their livelihoods if they put all their material online. Mr. Wiley's response: Adjust to the new reality. He points to the almost "pop star" popularity of some who have posted lecture videos online. Some have boosted class attendance and have raised interest in their courses, while others have overhauled and improved material in the process of submitting it. "What it has done is to expose teaching to peer review," he says.
- The Hindu. (March 24, 2008). Personal learning, research: a re-look .
Tools like OpenCourseware Finder (http://ocwfinder.com/) and Lecture archives ( http://www.lecturesarchive.com/4466.html) can be used to locate these resources. In addition to the static content mentioned above, lots of pedagogical resources are being generated on Wikis and social bookmarking/Web 2.0 sites too.
- Campus Technology. (March 1, 2008). Will Digital Texts Succeed?.
As always, we have to calibrate our "change-the-world slider" somewhere between what the technologies are capable of delivering and what our social systems are able to absorb. David Wiley, lead architect of OpenCourseWare management system eduCommons and a faculty member at Utah State University, describes his ideal textbook as seeded by 30 percent of facultyselected content that "magnetizes" 70 percent more content contributed from students taking the class engaged in active learning. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect for Microsoft Live Labs (labs.live.com), offers a compelling example of an interface exquisitely designed for socially constructed knowledge spaces, and one able to display an entire legible copy of Dickens' Bleak House on a single screen, preserving social context and page-turning with an imaging algorithm that can zoom to a single word from within an entire text on screen. (David Wiley, meet SeaDragon and Photosynth-both Live Labs innovations-and may they someday serve your courses well!)
- USA TODAY. (February 27, 2008). Free college courses feed global hunger for learning.
As more institutions supply open courseware, independent learners who might not be MIT-level whiz kids will find subjects presented on more accessible levels, according to David Wiley, director of the Center for Open Sustainable Learning at USU.
- CNN Money. (January 29, 2008). Cisco to Launch Mediterranean Youth Technology Club (MYTecC) and the Digital Cities Project Aimed at Long Term Economic and Social Development.
Through technology and Web 2.0, young people will communicate with one another, share ideas and create a dialog whilst learning the English language, IT and leadership skills, tooling them to become responsible leaders of the future. Cisco previously committed $500,000 to support the MYTecC programe. With participants from Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Portugal, Turkey and Yemen, MYTecC is developed in partnership with the ICTDAR (ICT for Development in the Arab Region) a regional program for the United Nations Development Programe (UNDP) Teachers without Borders, The Peres Centre for Peace and Cisco.
- Washington Post. (December 31, 2007). Internet Access Is Only Prerequisite For More and More College Classes.
Some professors try this on their own, on a small scale. Schools are feeling their way, experimenting with different technologies; some use Utah State University's eduCommons on the Web; some post to free sites such as YouTube and the Apple university site iTunes U.
- Post Gazette Now News. (November 18, 2007). How to take a course at MIT free -- at home.
MIT spends $4 million a year on it.
Efforts are being made to decrease the cost of providing the materials, including using free software developed at Utah State University to make the process of posting the materials easier.
...
"About five years from now, everyone's going to have one of these," Dr. Wiley said. "It's going to be part of their Web site, just like when you go to a university Web site, now you expect to find information about admissions, registration, tuition and fees." - Campus Technology. (November 13, 2007). Textbooks: A Value Proposition.
eduCommons, an open courseware platform pioneered at Utah State University and one reason for the state of Utah’s decision to earmark $200,000 for open courseware content development and use; and Connexions, an open courseware project anchored at Rice University (TX) that uses Lulu for printing-on-demand delivery of content. Need more sources of digital content? Try the American Council of Learned Societies print-on-demand program, the ever-expanding Google Print Library Project, or the consortial Open Content Alliance.
- Education Portal. (October 29, 2007). Colleges and Universities that Offer Free Courses Online.
[Utah State University's eduCommons-based OpenCourseWare is mentioned in the article.]
List of the Most Respected Free Online Schools
A handful of world-class universities and colleges have decided to offer free courses, assignments, and lectures via the World Wide Web, using a variety of means that include streaming video, podcasts, and downloadable lecture notes. Some of the most respected of these schools include:
...
- InfoWorld Online. (July 24, 2007). You're never alone with Plone. Page 2.
Utah State University is using Plone as the content management system for its eduCommons OpenCourseWare management system. EduCommons helps universities develop and manage educational material from their undergraduate and graduate courses that they've decided to make available to everyone for free online. The university has done a lot of work around dealing with copyright issues and is donating that effort back to Plone.
Universities in Cuba, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States are already using eduCommons and Utah State is in discussions with universities in China, said David Ray, developer at the University's Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. Software vendor Novell's global training services unit is also a fan of eduCommons, using it to make educational material available for its Novell authorized courses and other customer training information.
- Heise Online. (March 20, 2007). Brainshare: Novell virtualisiert sich weiter.
Due to the many new announcements, the small news about Novell's new, eduCommons-based Open CourseWare did not make it into the keynote. Nevertheless, Open CourseWare as Novell's first Open Source project in their well-tendered qualification system may have a big importance in the future. According to Novell, more than one third of the BrainShare attendees take an exam. A new certification has been announced in the keynote. As NCE, Novell Certified Engineer, someone proofs to be knowlegdeable in the both the Windows and the Linux arena.
- Online Education Database. (March 1, 2007). How the Open Source Movement Has Changed Education: 10 Success Stories. (Also Slashdot.)
Based on that premise, MIT's OCW began to provide users with open access to class syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and even a selection of video lectures in 2003. Eleven other U.S. colleges plan to follow MIT's example, and six of those 12 colleges have offered an online presence (other than MIT):
- Book Chase. (February 13, 2007). Printed-on-the-Spot Books Are Given to Young Utah Students.
Utah State University's Center for Open and Sustainable Learning Microlibrary has a 2007 goal of delivering 5,000 "printed-on-the-spot" books to Utah's elementary school students. In addition to getting books into the hands of young readers, the project seems to build an excitement about books in the classrooms lucky enough to receive a visit from the traveling print shop.
- Teleread. (February 12, 2007). Gutenberg classics for some Utah kids—via print on demand.
Here’s the lowdown out of Logan, Utah—via the Salt Lake City Tribune:
Educator Anitra Jensen lost control of her classroom earlier this month - and she didn’t mind a bit.
This seasoned educator watched her fifth-grade students at Edith Bowen Elementary School [link added] shift their attention from her and to the words on the pages of their “own” new books.
Freshly printed and bound, their titles of choice were a gift from Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning Microlibrary.
- Salt Lake Tribune. (February 12, 2007). Portable library builds books on spot.
- Ozmozr Hits the Blogosphere
- Mashable. (January 20, 2007). In-Game Ads, SpiralFrog, Ozmozr Launched, DuggSpace.
- Minger. (January 19, 2007). Ozmozr — Delicious for RSS.
- WWWhatsnew. (January 19, 2007). Ozmozr - Agrupar el mejor contenido de la web.
As I was collecting these materials, I noticed that other universities around the world have now joined MIT in an OpenCourseWare Consortium, and one of them is Utah State University. Here's some feedback they got: "USU OCW restores my faith in humanity. In a world where there is such a focus on making money at any cost it's refreshing to find people who spend their time and means to better the society they live in by making available useful and informative resources that anyone can use without expecting monetary reward."
Besides MIT, Tufts, and Johns Hopkins, the OCW consortium (ocwconsor tium.org) in the United States includes among its members Michigan State, Michigan, Notre Dame, and Utah State. Internationally, members include groups of universities in China, Japan, and Spain.
8. Using USU
Utah State University serves as home base for The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, an ambitious lot of open sourcers who host a “Creative Learning Environments Laboratory,” provide a repository of USU educational materials, and even offer online instructions for starting OpenCourseWare at your institution.
Demonstrations were offered on a multitude of projects based on Rails, including Pongyow , a social networking site featuring photos, video and blogging; www.spock.com , a search engine; and Ozmozer, which enables information-sharing by aggregating links and RSS feeds in a mashup style. Dunn showed MaxWiki , which melds a wiki with content management.
A program that has worked worldwide may soon be coming to rural Cache Valley, and Trenton residents may soon be able to access free educational resources if a Utah State University professor can find a location for a computer center in that community.
David Wiley, an assistant professor in the Instructional Technology Department, wants to offer residents of the primarily agricultural community the ability to access free online courses through the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at USU.
Opencourseware Finder
Reputed educational institutions such as MIT (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html) publish course materials on a range of subjects that include engineering, biology and economics for free download. The newly launched search engine, Opencourseware Finder (http://opencontent.org/ocwfinder/), helps you locate such materials with ease.
From its interface, you can select the subject of your choice and, once the subject is chosen, the service will display the relevant links.
David Wiley, an assistant professor of instructional technology and director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University, said that he was concerned that the RFP process favors large companies like Blackboard. While smaller companies are starting to offer support for open source, colleges would need to compare an open source proposal and such a business proposal against a single plan from Blackboard.
Open Learning Support
These self-managed communities are also part of the OER movement. David Wiley and his colleagues at Utah State University created and also support self-managed community software, which they call Open Learning Support (OLS). OLS is a free, open resource that provides space on the Internet where people can connect to discuss topics, share information, debate, and so on. OLS is already linked to 2,200 modules in the Connexions collection and provides discussion services for MIT’s OCW initiative. Its most important feature is its self-management.
he university’s project has spawned sites in Spain and China that are providing native language versions of some MIT courses (with a third, still unendorsed by MIT, beginning in Taiwan, and another expected to be announced in Japan next month).
It has also helped encourage dozens of other colleges in the United States and worldwide to join what Margulies calls “this new movement toward open sharing of knowledge and information.” Major efforts are under way at Utah State University, Foothill-DeAnza Community College District and Carnegie Mellon University, among others.
Currently eight other universities are in discussions with MIT about how to publish their courses in the same manner, including Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Utah State, and Tufts, which went live with six courses in June.
Representatives from MIT and six other U.S. universities that are starting open-courseware projects met at MIT in February to trade tips on how to manage their projects. Representatives from Chinese universities attended as well, as did officials from Universia.net, a coalition of universities in Portugal, Spain, and several South American countries that is working to translate MIT's course materials into Spanish and Portuguese.
The U.S. institutions represented were the Harvard University Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, Tufts University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's School of Information, the University of Notre Dame, and Utah State University. Ms. Margulies stressed that the meeting was informal, and that no consortium had been created, though one may form in the future.
But the project is tantalisingly headed towards creating online learning communities in different parts of the world. It has embarked on a pilot research project under which selected courses would offer "links to learning communities, where individuals around the world could connect with each other, collaborate, form study groups, and receive support for their use of MIT OCW materials in formal and informal educational setting."
It is being implemented jointly with the Open Sustainable Learning Opportunities Research Group in the Department of Instructional Technology at Utah State University. Called Open Learning Support (OLS), it aims at building up `social software', that "enables informal learning communities to form around existing open educational content."
Researchers affiliated with the Open Sustainable Learning Opportunity (OSLO) Group at Utah State University have launched the Open Learning Support (OLS) initiative, a program that complements the free Web-based educational materials from MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. The OLS initiative is set up to work with seven MIT courses, but eventually it will work with all of the OCW courses and will invite other free content providers to participate.
Making the announcement, OSLO director Dr. David Wiley said the pilot launch of OLS promotes software that integrates with OCW materials to allow learners to connect with each other, form study groups and receive support for using OCW materials in formal and informal educational settings. Open Learning Support is funded by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
David Wiley of Utah State University defines learning objects as "any digital resource that can be reused to support learning." While there have been other collections of learning objects (such as Apple Learning Interchange and MERLOT), the announcement by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative is the most intriguing. Other collections contain isolated learning objects, which means individual faculty members may find it difficult, or at least very time-consuming, to figure out how to incorporate these elements into the overall curriculum. MIT's OpenCourseWare will develop the first comprehensive set of integrated learning objects.
A new public license -- the Open Publication License -- promises to bring the power of the open-source software movement to video, audio, and text while still preserving authors' rights to profit from the calluses of their creative hands.
"It's all about being able to access information for free," said David Wiley, founder of Opencontent.org, where the latest draft of the license will be made available for public comment later this week.
OpenContent is the brainchild of David Wiley, a doctoral candidate in instructional psychology at Brigham Young University. When Wiley had some teaching materials that he thought other people would find useful, he wanted to be able to circulate them for free, but in such a way that he knew he�d get credit for them and that they wouldn�t be altered in an irresponsible way.
