Education/EduCourse

This is the wiki page for Open|Web|Content|Education -- a six week online course where educators learn about open content licensing, open web technologies and open teaching methods.

Co-organized by Mozilla, ccLearn and P2PU. Includes interactive online talks and hands on prototyping of open learning projects.

Starts on 2 April, 2009! Sign-up is closed now and participant profiles have been moved to the Participants page.

This is the original course announcement.

Audience

• Educators looking for skills to help them with open teaching and learning.
• Should have some tech or content production skills already.
• Likely to come from areas like: new media, communications, design, comp studies.
• Have a project idea that they'd like to work on as part of the course.

Goals

• Help educators learn about open licensing, technology and teaching.
• Test and assess the online course method being developed by Mozilla Labs.
• Create awareness of Mozilla Education, ccLearn, and P2PU amongst educators.
• Gather design ideas for education.mozilla.org and other open learning projects.

Content

This is only a basic overview of the course. Please refer to the detailed Outline for the seminar dates, links to background reading and everything else you need to participate.

The course helps educators develop basic skills in three three broad areas -- open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy -- to help them apply 'open' in their teaching. Some of the most konwledgeable people working in this field, will give online seminars introducing the key concepts and answering questions. To get a sense how these ideas play out in the real world, we will also be looking at a number of case-studies, and their use of open content, technology and pedagogy.

Finally, students will be working (by themselves or in small groups) on their own blueprints and concepts for open education applications.

Week 1 - Intro

• Week 1 serves as an introduction to the course content and logistics. We'll have a web seminar with some of the organisers from Mozilla and CC and discuss some of the ideas for blueprints and concepts put forward by participants.

Week 2 - Open content / Open educational resources

• Overview of what's happening in OER (Seminar by Ahrash Bissell, ccLearn) and an in-depth look at the case studies.

Week 3 - Open web tech (basics)

• What makes the web open? What makes it closed? (Seminar by Mozilla's Chris Blizzard)

Week 4 - Open content / Licensing

• Licensing for open educational content (Seminar by Lila Bailey, ccLearn counsel)

Week 5 - Open web tech (on the horizon)

• Emerging open web technologies and Mozilla Labs experiments. (Seminar by someone from Mozilla labs)

Week 6: Open learning and pedagogy

• Overview of approaches in participatory online learning. Round-table conversation with George Siemens, David Wiley, and others (facilitated by Philipp Schmidt, P2PU)

Case studies

We will look at four existing open education projects as Case Studies (follow link for longer descriptions, interviews, links) to understand how they used open licensing, open technology and open pedagogy:

• David Humphrey: Mozilla Course @ Seneca College, developing software development skills in a large open source community
• David Wiley: Introduction to Open Education course, where students from around the world participate online
• Jim Groom: Using Wordpress MU at University of Mary Washington as an alternative open publishing platform
• Wayne Mackintosh: The Learning 4 Content project at WikiEducator builds capacity to develop free educational content

Practical assignment

We asked all participants to submit description of a project that they'd like to work on during the six weeks of the course. Have a look at what they came up with on the Participants page.

Questions

Post your questions, and find answers on the FAQ page.