Open Source Education Endeavor
So I have been reading, learning, and following a few people on Twitter about Open Education. I like the idea and I would like to contribute to the movement to make education available to anyone and everyone. I am currently taking an operating systems class where we are learning how to administer a Linux system. Many of my colleagues and I are frustrated with how the class is being handled and feel that the fun of learning is being sucked out of it by doing textbook examples and questions. One of my biggest frustrations with current teaching methods is that many times there is little more motivation to do something other than for a grade.
My idea has been to create real world situations/ projects that involve the same concepts as the book but make them exciting to the students. When approaching the professor about this idea I was laughed at and told “Sure, you create the projects and I will take a look.” Somehow I get the feeling that not much is going to happen even if I did do that. As a side note, I have also heard rumors that the University is changing the class or getting rid of it in some way. This got me to thinking why not carry out my idea but make it open to anyone? I could get my classmates and friends who are in the class currently and some who just love Linux and we could create a smashing class online free to anyone who wants to learn. Every classmate that I have talked to about this has been enthusiastic and said they would love to contribute.
Creating a open source class would really help my classmates and I learn the material well for many reasons. First, the learning is no longer just for a grade but is a public service for others. When learning is turned into service the whole paradigm of motivation changes in students and amazing things start to happen. Second, the final published product is public and if done well enough, is something students can show future potential employers as an example work. Third, the collaboration that can occur to create, review, and modify the content would be awesome and would create incredible learning and growing experiences that would be invaluable to being more effective in the workplace in the future. There are of course more but that is all I am going to list for now.
So the big question now is what is going to be the most effective way to organize and put the class content online? A blog with different posts and pages, using a service like Google’s knol, forum (*puke!*) or is there some other way that would work great that I haven’t found yet? I would love your help and input on this. Please leave a comment with suggestions/ ideas or get a hold of me on twitter @MikeGrace.
Check out http://www.dspace.org/
I believe thay have a public holding space for online courses as well.
Thanks for your input Mike! I always appreciate your perspective and good insight. I will be compiling a list here soon of all the different possibilities and some of the pros and cons I can see with using each. Very exciting stuff indeed. ; )
Really interesting post Mike. As you know I have been teaching for a few years (6 or 7?) and I agree with what you say. The shift has been completely about ‘grades’. It is normal to just look at achievement and retention and see it all as facts and figures. For me, I always try my best to make it a personal experience for the students. Sure we have to hit the targets, but where I can configure a program to meet their learning needs I will. (Heck you could even ask my students themselves heh!)
Your idea of this open education system has a few issues really. One being that they need to all come in at roughly a similar level. If someone has very little prior knowledge, will you have some way to help them integrate? Will they knowhow to use the system you set up etc… those types of questions. This isn’t a big issue, just something to bear in mind when making it. That you might consider a tiered system.
Also, at what point does the course ’start & finish’, in terms of, it can be very hard to get momentum and make it all work if folks join up half way through. So there needs to be some formal structure, maybe quite short, say a 10 week program so folks can join in without too much delay.
I know you were floating ideas around about wiki systems etc… a few systems you may want to look at might be something like wet paint, or the really robust and education leader Moodle. For what you have described, setting out an actual course, I would look into Moodle as a great platform. You could map it out in weeks / resources etc… and it would be there for reusing, well forever really. Plus you can post updates to keep people informed about what is happening, dates of things going up, information that is current, much like a blog.
Your idea really sounds a fantastic one and you have already sounded out some interested folks, you gotta go for it and let me know if I can help in anyway, its a very interesting topic and was actually considering a similar topic for Doctorate study.
Best
~CMoz
Wow! Thank you for taking the time to comment and give some good advice. I am glad you brought up the issues that you foresee with the project and future users. I am excited to take all the information I am gathering and put together something that could be very interesting and useful to many people. Kind of crazy that you were considering a similar topic for your doctorate study. I will definitely keep updates on my blog as to how things are going with the project and thanks again for your input. ; )