About Open Courseware

A key sector of open content for learning is open courseware: the publication of for free online of course materials for subjects taught at a university or college.
   Courseware contributes not only knowledge resources. Open courseware also offers patterns of instruction, pedagogical experience and technique models — factors in learning that are ways of presenting the knowledge resources. The golden swamp consists of the knowledge alone, and that knowledge is not imbedded in any particular order or organization for teaching it.
   The golden swamp is a network of knowledge where the nodes are linked based on the meaning of the knowledge itself, not a teaching schedule. Thus the knowledge can be used in many different ways — including as a resource for different teaching methods and courses.
   The contents of the golden swamp itself are nuggets of knowledge that can be studied individually or linked into patterns with other knowledge nuggets to form ideas and concepts.
   Courses taught in schools are ways of interfacing nuggets of knowledge for presentation to students. One of the great and wonderful ways that the golden swamp is receiving knowledge nuggets that form nodes is by the opening by academic institutions of the content of their courses online. The knowledge nuggets contained in the courses can be studied individually. Nuggets can also be linked with other nuggets —in the course or anywhere on the open internet—into patterns of ideas and concepts.
   The leader of the open courseware movement is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The MIT OPENCOURSEWARE story and resources are here.

The Emergence Online
of Open Content Courseware

Excerpts from
Emerging Online Knowledge
by Judy Breck,
Roman Education February 2006

Early on in my knowledge collecting experience I began looking at The World Lecture Hall for links to place on HomeworkCentral.com and to review in our newsletter. Based at the University of Texas, since its development in 1994-95 the website has listed free content from courses, organized by subject. That content is not at all limited to UT, but comes now from higher education online course materials from all over the world.
    Starting in 1998, I began visiting The World Lecture Hall every few weeks to look for subject links. Each time I would go back a few courses would have been added here and there for chemistry or European history or Classical literature and various other subjects. The materials were posted with the name of the source college, course and instructor. The course syllabus would usually be there and that was where I would start digging. And there I would find gems!
    What I would find would be a diagram, or chart, or set of principles, or animation — in each case the instructor’s own concept of how to use the new internet medium to reinforce his or her teaching of a subject in which the instructor was a devoted expert. Not everything I found was compelling. Some materials were better than others. But they all represented the beginning of a new era of teaching.
    The course materials placed in the mid-1990s into The World Lecture Hall were among the earliest open content for learning. Although their source was what is known as the academy — colleges, universities and their related research and the like — the knowledge nuggets I found at The World Lecture Hall were almost always the creations of individual instructors. Other open content was also beginning to show up online from larger sources within the academy.

The Academy
Open content for learning whose source was colleges and universities tended to bubble up from individuals and from departments during the 1990s. To my knowledge, it was not until MIT’s OpenCourseware initiative was announced in April 2001 that campus-wide opening of content got underway. The creation of content began much earlier at the instructor or department which kept what was and is produced under the stewardship of the knowledge experts. Open courseware is an access process. Creating the content remains essentially with those who research and teach it, which is a key factor in guaranteeing its authenticity.
    There are many college and university departmental projects of major significance in providing open content for learning. They have emerged across a spectrum of schools with different ones ending up dominant in different fields. There are many examples given throughout these pages of this source of open content based in the academy. Three more are listed here as examples representing many, many more that enrich the golden swamp.
    The University of California, Berkeley Museum of Paleontology is a magnificent interface to an institution devoted to investigating and promoting understanding of the history of life and diversity of the Earth’s biota.
    The Douglass Archives of Public Address is a repository of American oratory and related documents built by the Northwestern University scholars and teachers of rhetoric and speech.
    Rutgers University is the home of the Nucleic Acid Database which includes introductory sections to Nucleic Acids for DNA and RNA and a Nucleic Acid Highlights section.
    Many universities create and host tutorial webpages with elementary open content for learning intended for pre-college students. Two examples of these are the University of Wisconsin’ s The Why Files and Drexel University’s Elementary Math Problem of the Week.
    Academic subject groups that network their knowledge among scholars in their field from many colleges and universities provide another outstanding academy source of open content.
    The Advanced Papyrological Information System lists as partners these universities: Columbia, Duke, Princeton, California Berkeley, Chicago, Michigan, Toronto and Yale. The collections scraps of ancient writing held by all of these great learning centers are centered into one database. It is a spectacular resource for papyrus scholars, but because the resource is open content, elementary school students can quickly get a valid idea of ancient writing by looking at the images of actual artifacts. One supposes a youngster in Egypt browsing the images would resonate with the relics from his home’s vaunted past.
    Taking inter-institutional merging around a subject to a new level impossible without the internet is a webpage based at the University of Arizona called Image understanding as multi-media translation. Ideas, institutions, images and words are linked, mixed and analyzed. The minimalization of ideas into separate webpages, as discussed in Essay X, makes unlimited configurations of the work of scholars a stunning new richness in research, thinking and assets for learning
. . . .

When MIT began its OpenCourseWare (“OCW”) initiative in April of 2001 it proclaimed a vision that other institutions have caught. Different from teaching courses to students at a distance, MIT decided to put the materials used in its campus courses openly online. As described in Essay X, MIT is far down the road in massively achieving its goal. Materials from over 900 of its courses already online are already being studied by learners across the global internet.
    MIT’s OCW is a model and for other universities, such as the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health OpenCourseWare which had six courses online by spring of 2005.
   The Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California is pursuing OCW with support from the Hewlett Foundation. Their project is called Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets (SOFIA.)
   Harvard University Open Library Connections Program was founded in 2002 with the goal of making research materials from libraries and museums across Harvard freely available over the Internet — approaching the content not from the course source but from repositories. Because courses and collections are modularized in their open content form online, they both can be freely linked and are important growing sectors of the golden swamp.
   Utah State University’s eduCommons is an open courseware project that was just getting underway online as I completed this book. Its goals include catalyzing the growth of communities of learners around the eduCommons. That vision reflects the creative momentum from the open content movement to the golden swamp. The interconnectivity of knowledge itself and of the people using it arises from the network behavior of the new ecology of learning.
   In a purely network native approach at Rice University’s Connexions a content commons of “knowledge chunks” dubbed “modules” is building up with contributions from the open internet. Other units of Connections are software, including a course builder for assembling modules, intellectual property licensing under Creative Commons and quality controls. As of spring 2005, Connexions had over a million users from more 157 countries tapping into 2,300 modules and courses.
    Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative has moved into the future of course design. The courses are designed through a combination of cognitive theory and faculty expertise. The open and free course versions are comparable to courses taught at Carnegie Mellon University but do not include the instructor led aspects of the course nor does a student get academic credit.
   SAKAI is “a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education.” This foresighted effort helps to prepare the way for a future of effortless access and exchange of virtual human knowledge.
    EduTools is a reviewing partner to e-learning activities. Created by universities allied in the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications the project reviews course management systems, online courses research projects.
    Two other projects supported by the Hewlett Foundation are not involved in the open content movement as courseware contributors. They contribute crucially in other ways.
   The Internet Archive, as mentioned in essay X, has been archiving vast numbers of internet since pages since 1996. The project’s concept is to be a library of the internet — and following the public library spirit it is free for public use. I think of it as the library of the golden swamp.
   CreativeCommons addresses the intellectual property issues that come up by making websites open. The issues around the copyright of webpages, the solutions CreativeCommons offers and related topics are discussed in Idea 104.