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Open courseware on every campus by 2016?

students522-150x150 — Nine in 10 MIT undergraduates say they use open courseware.

Just as colleges and universities have adopted online classes over the past decade, students can expect free open courseware of some kind at every campus in the U.S. in the next five years, a University of California-Irvine official said during a recent forum on open courseware.

Open textbook advocates from the publishing industry, online learning organizations, and academia met at the UC Irvine campus Jan. 26 to discuss trends in free course material and how making textbooks, lectures, and other course materials available online free of charge has changed higher education.

Gary Matkin, dean of distance education and continuing learning at UC Irvine—which has one of the country’s premiere open courseware sites—predicted that open courseware would become standard at small community colleges and research universities alike.…Read More

Gates Foundation launches $20 million program to expand technology use

The initiative will fund practices that help prepare students for college completion.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Oct. 11 announced the Next Generation Learning Challenges, a collaborative, multi-year initiative that aims to help dramatically improve college readiness and college completion in the United States through the use of technology tools and educational technology. The program will award grants to organizations and innovators to expand promising technology tools to more students, teachers, and schools. It is led by the nonprofit EDUCAUSE, which works to advance higher education through the use of information technology.

Next Generation Learning Challenges released the first of a series of requests for proposals (RFPs) on Oct. 11 to solicit funding proposals for technology applications that can improve postsecondary education. This round of funding will total up to $20 million, including grants that range from $250,000 to $750,000. Applicants with top-rated proposals will receive funds to expand their programs and demonstrate effectiveness in serving larger numbers of students. Proposals are due Nov. 19, 2010; winners are expected to be announced by March 31, 2011.

“American education has been the best in the world, but we’re falling below our own high standards of excellence for high school and college attainment,” said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We’re living in a tremendous age of innovation. We should harness new technologies and innovation to help all students get the education they need to succeed.”…Read More

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Despite rumors, MIT OpenCourseWare insists ‘no paywall’

Contrary to erroneous reports, MIT says it has no plans to implement a paywall for its free open courseware, ReadWriteWeb reports. “That is simply not under consideration,” says Steve Carson, MIT OpenCourseWare’s external relations director. After all, there are some 250 sites that mirror MIT OpenCourseWare, and more than 10 million copies of course packages have been downloaded. The information is already out there. And the mission of the program remains the same: “open sharing of MIT teaching materials with educators, students, and self-learners around the world.” Although there is no paywall in store for the program, Carson does say the project has to be mindful of budgetary issues. The program cost $3.7 million to run last year. The site now features a prominent “Donate Now” button. Carson says that small donations—around the $50 level—comprised about $220,000 in the program’s revenues last year, and the program hopes to hit $500,000 this fiscal year. Likening MIT OpenCourseWare to the “information for public good” services of NPR and PBS, Carson says that the program will seek funding from both charitable organizations, as well as corporate underwriters. Currently the program is considering advertising on the web site, something Carson thinks will appeal to organizations who want to be in front of a global audience of well-educated people…

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Virtual Symposium examines worldwide growth of online access

The Virtual Symposium focused on keeping open-source technologies free.

Online learning, open courseware, eBooks, wikis, and many other innovative technologies have forever affected education by connecting any topic in any discipline to any learner in any place. Even individuals in remote communities now can access unlimited information free of charge, if they have an internet connection. This also provides more possibilities for international collaboration, knowledge building, and sharing of best practices.

Drexel University’s School of Education capitalized on these possibilities during its second annual live and online Virtual Symposium, in conjunction with Wainhouse Research and the World Bank Institute’s Global Development Learning Network (GDLN). This year’s Virtual Symposium built upon the theme Education for Everyone: Expanding Access Through Technology.

The symposium highlighted education technology innovations, and it examined challenges to access—for example, among poor and rural communities—and possibilities for overcoming them. A major feature of the symposium was the ability for participants to share experiences among peers in both developing and developed countries.…Read More

Open courseware 2.0: The next steps in the OER movement

Putting free courseware online was a first step in reimagining education. So what now? Wiki universities, smart courses, and—maybe—improved learning, reports the New York Times. A decade has passed since MIT decided to give much of its course materials to the public in an act of largesse. The MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative helped usher in the “open educational resources” (OER) movement, with its ethos of sharing knowledge via free online educational offerings. The movement has helped dislodge higher education from its brick-and-mortar moorings and has given higher education unprecedented reach—but putting course materials online for free isn’t cheap. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the principal financial backer of the open educational movement, has spent more than $110 million on these efforts over the past eight years, and now the foundation is pushing its grant recipients to do more than just make courseware available. In a letter to grantees in February, the foundation said that the current financial climate has forced it to reduce its education grant-making budget by 40 percent since 2008, requiring the foundation to adhere more closely to its primary goals: “to increase access to knowledge for all and improve the practices of teaching and learning.” “We’d like to see data being gathered, and see these materials being improved, and we’d like to see new models of learning,” says Victor Vuchic, the Hewlett program officer responsible for open education. He says the foundation is interested in projects that track and analyze who is using programs, look at how open education enhances learning, and examine how it is changing the future of education…

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$20 billion in ed funding slashed from student aid legislation

Funding for an online course program was cut out of the final student aid bill. — $500 million in proposed funding to create open online courses was cut out of the final student aid bill.

In last-minute maneuvering designed to get the measure to pass, lawmakers eliminated $20 billion in proposed education funding from the student aid overhaul enacted by Congress last week—dampening enthusiasm for legislation that K-12 and higher-education officials had lobbied for over the past year. Of that $20 billion, $12 billion was slated for community colleges to boost graduation rates, partly through the development of open online courses, and $8 billion was pegged for an early-childhood education program.

Community college officials cheered the American Graduation Initiative (AGI) when lawmakers introduced the program last fall, but last-minute compromises and worries over the cost of the student aid bill forced legislators to eliminate the $12 billion set aside for AGI, observers said. The program aimed to help community colleges produce 5 million more graduates over the next decade.

AGI had included $500 million for an online skills laboratory modeled after Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI). The free, open internet classes were to be created by the Departments of Defense, Education, and Labor, according to a White House announcement.…Read More

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Open courseware as a viable business model?

Open courseware with online video lectures cost the most to make available on the web. — Open courseware that incorporates video lectures costs the most to make available on the web.

Open courseware isn’t the end of higher education, as some have feared, but rather a recruiting tool that can lure people to enroll in credit-bearing classes, according to a Brigham Young University (BYU) study released last month.

The study, conducted by BYU’s Director of Independent Study Justin Johansen, examined the costs of making college course material available for free online, and how many enrollments resulted from having open courses available on a university’s web site.

The university has six open classes–three college-level and three high school courses–that drew almost 14,000 web page visits over a four-month span, generating 445 paid enrollments at BYU.…Read More

Duncan to publishers: Create engaging digital content

'We need to make school more relevant and engaging,' Duncan told education publishers.

The federal government’s investment in education technology is an opportunity for the publishing industry, which must respond by creating more engaging content that is relevant for today’s tech-savvy students, said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Speaking before the Association of American Publishers on March 4, Duncan said most young people can’t remember a time without the internet.

“But right now,” he said, “many students’ learning experiences in school don’t match the reality outside of school. We need to bridge this gap. We need to make school more relevant and engaging. We must make the on-demand, personalized tech applications that are part of students’ daily lives a more strategic part of their academic lives.”…Read More

What Bill Gates is learning online

Bill Gates' new web site reveals his thoughts on open courseware, school reform, and more.

It’s no surprise, really, but it turns out Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates is a strong supporter of the open-courseware movement that has swept through higher education in the last few years.

On a new web site that Gates launched this past week, he discusses some of his favorite sources for online lectures and other learning materials. He also offers his thoughts on education reform and a host of other topics.

“There are some great examples of how technology can enable almost anyone to learn from the world’s greatest minds,” he posted to GatesNotes.com.…Read More

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