[p2p-research] Fwd: Open University and Classes

[Kevin Carson]

---------- Forwarded message ----------

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/world/europe/01iht-educLede01.html?ref=education

For Exposure, Universities Put Courses on the Web By D.D. GUTTENPLAN Published:
November 1, 2010
LONDON — Until recently, if you wanted to take Professor Rebecca Henderson’s
course in advanced strategy to understand the long-term roots of why some
companies are unusually successful, you needed to be a student at the
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
where Ms. Henderson teaches at the Sloan School of Management. Admission to
the Sloan School is extremely selective, and tuition fees are over $50,000 a
year.

For the past two years, though, anyone with an Internet connection can
follow Ms. Henderson’s lectures online, where the lecture notes and course
assignments are available free through M.I.T. OpenCourseWare. Why give away
something with such a high market value?

“I put the course up because the president of M.I.T. asked us to,” said Ms.
Henderson. “My deep belief is that as academics we have a duty to disperse
our ideas as far and as freely as possible.”

Mary Lou Forward, executive director of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a
worldwide organization of about 250 academic institutions around the world,
adds that universities get “global engagement” from posting courses online.

There are also “recognition for individual faculty members who may be well
known within their disciplines but not outside them,” Ms. Forward said, and
what Ms. Henderson calls “first mover advantage.”

M.I.T.’s announcement in 2001 that it was going to put its entire course
catalog online gave a jump-start to what has now become a global Open
Educational Resources Movement whose goal, said Susan D’Antoni of Athabasca
University, in Canada, is “to try to share the world’s knowledge.”

Harvard<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/harvard_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
Yale<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/y/yale_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
Stanford and the University of
Michigan<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_michigan/index.html?inline=nyt-org>all
now offer substantial portions of their courses online. In Britain,
the
Open University, which has been delivering distance learning for over 40
years, offers free online courses in every discipline on the OpenLearn Web
site; the Open University also maintains a dedicated YouTube channel and has
often had courses listed on the top 10 downloads at iTunes University.
There, students can gain access to beginner courses in French, Spanish and
German as well as courses in history, philosophy and astronomy — all free.

Most OpenCourseWare is in English, but its Web site offers courses in
Chinese, Dutch, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Hebrew. The African Virtual
University, based in Nairobi, has produced education courses for science and
math teachers in English, French and Portuguese.

Much of the early work on Open Education was financed by wealthy
universities or foundations, especially the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, whose mission includes using “technology to help equalize the
distribution of high quality knowledge.”

But relying on philanthropy is not sustainable. Ms. D’Antoni, who followed
the movement’s explosive growth in her former job at the International
Institute for Educational Planning, part of
Unesco<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations_educational_scientific_and_cultural_organization/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
said the initial focus was getting educational material onto the Web. “The
big problem then was copyright — getting legal permission to use things,”
she said. “Now there is all this material. But who is using it, and what are
they doing with it? And who is going to pay for it?”

At least a partial answer to those questions — and a sense of where Open
Education is going — should become more apparent this week, when hundreds of
educators, academics, computer scientists, artists and at least a few
hackers gather in Barcelona for two meetings that might be said to represent
the two wings of the movement.

One event, Open Ed 2011, is the seventh-annual meeting of a group that began
as an educational offshoot of open-source software, which allows users to
alter, change or improve computer programs freely and to distribute the
results without charge. Open Educational Resources, the term adopted by
Unesco in 2002, makes course content and on-line learning tools available
without cost over the Internet to users who are similarly free to adopt,
improve or redistribute them.

Open Ed 2011 is being held at the CosmoCaixa, the science museum in
Barcelona, and organized by the Open University of the Netherlands, the Open
University of Catalonia and Brigham Young
University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/brigham_young_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.
The gathering is for researchers, academics and administrators “who wish to
learn about the institutional decisions needed to make open education a
reality.” The theme this year is “impact and sustainability.”

Meanwhile, at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, “edupunks,
hackerspaces, creative commoners, radical librarians and Wikipedians” at the
Drumbeat Learning Freedom and the Web Festival will assemble for “three days
of making, teaching, hacking, inventing and shaping the future of education
and the Web.” The Drumbeat festival is organized by
Mozilla<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/mozilla_foundation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
the nonprofit foundation that owns the makers of Mozilla Firefox, the
open-source Internet browser. The festival has political and educational
ambitions.
“There’s a lot of overlap,” said Ms. Forward, the executive director of the
OpenCourseWare Consortium, who plans to attend both gatherings. Ms. Forward,
a former dean of African studies at the School for International Training in
Brattleboro, Vermont. Ms. said that for her, “questions of unequal access”
to education were the most pressing. “What I think about all the time,” she
said, “are ways to bring education to people.”

Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, said applying
Mozilla’s resources to the problems of education “fits in a couple of ways.”


“We have an instinct that as the Web affects society, those parts of society
can also affect the Web,” he said.

Mr. Surman describes the Open Education movement as having three pieces:
“There’s the content piece — can I get the material? And the pedagogy piece
— what are the ways we can teach each other using the Web? How can we make
this better for learners and teachers? And finally there’s the question of
accreditation and certification.”

This has been a sensitive subject for the movement. One reason M.I.T.
decided to “give away” its courses, Ms. Forward said, was “we didn’t think
we could replicate the quality of a student’s experience on campus.”

M.I.T. students can use OpenCourseWare courses to get a feel for a subject
or an instructor, while students at other universities can use them to
supplement their own courses. “If you’re taking a course on Pompeii, and you
want to know more about volcanoes, we have a course for that,” Ms. Forward
said. But while OpenCourseWare students attend the same lectures, and take
the same tests as M.I.T. students do, they do not get M.I.T. credit, or an
M.I.T. degree.

At the Open University, where the model is not a selective one, their
OpenLearn courses are designed to offer a gateway to enrollment. So far, the
experiment seems to be working, with some 6,000 students from the free
courses going on to enroll in fee-paying courses.

But as a public institution, the Open University also has a mission to
disseminate its content as widely as possible. In the past, this meant that
science lectures were broadcast on the
BBC<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/british_broadcasting_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
often in the middle of the night. While the Open University still produces
science programs, these days you are more likely to find the Open University
on YouTube, where Andrew Law, the university’s director of multiplatform
broadcasting, stars in “Head Spin,” a film about optical illusions.

Some students at the African Virtual University do pay tuition, said Bakary
Diallo, the university’s rector. “Education has costs, and someone has meet
them,” he said. But in work financed by the African Development Bank, the
university has also produced 33 modules in math, chemistry, physics and
biology for use in training teachers under the creative commons model that
can be available almost anywhere in the world.

“This is a pan-African institution,” Mr. Diallo said, “and now Africa is
contributing to global knowledge.”











-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
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Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
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