OpenEd: Week5

Week 5: Example Open Education Projects

Open University (UK) Open Content Initiative

Rice Connexions

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

UNESCO Open Training Platform

MIT OCW

National Repository of Online Courses

QUESTIONS: What do these representative open education projects have in common? What differentiates them? In the context of open education projects, what does "quality" mean?

Similarities:
- the general idea of offering knowledge for free (it's not always "sharing" but sometimes it looks like a sort of "philantropy" as demonstrated by the fact that some materials are copyrighted);
- the support from an external organization (Hewlett Foundation in the majority of cases, exept for the UNESCO)
- contents destined to higher education (high school/college or adulte learning)
- focus on content rather than on communication / interaction
- dedicated website (or repository) except one (OpenLearn) which is based on Moodle (one could expect 'open' initiatives to be more connected with open software... but it isn't so)

Differences:
- some websites require registration, some others no;
- some contents are issued under CC licence, some are copyrighted;
- some websites are just a collection of links to external resources (not always free!)
- not all are equipped with online tutors and it's not always possible to personalize the content

Quality
As Antonio observes, quality is connected with reliability, accuracy, instructional design
For reliability and accuracy reasons, some initiatives (OCW) don't allow external contributions
[to be continued]