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!
We sent out the course [[Education/EduCourse/Announcement|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 the basic overview, which we will expand on the Outline page as the course gets underway.
Week 1 - Intro
- Week 1 serves as an introduction to the course content and logistics, and clarify any questions about the projects.
- Describe course goals and intro students (Mark Surman, Frank Hecker, Ahrash Bissell, Philipp Schmidt)
- Discuss assignments, and student projects
- Participants get 10 min overview of each case study (pre-recorded audio or video interview)
Week 2 - Open educational resources and case-studies
- Overview of what's happening in OER (Seminar by Ahrash Bissell, ccLearn)
- Discussion of case studies (Representatives from each case-study provide feedback)
- Participants post first outlines of their projects / designs
Week 3 - Open web tech (basics) / Project review
- What makes the web open? What makes it closed? (Seminar by Mozilla's Chris Blizzard)
- Basic techs like JavaScript, CSS, Add ons
- Review of how cases do and don't use open web tech
- Participants and Mozilla/ccLearn/P2PU mentors review group projects and provide feedback
Week 4 - Licensing
- Licensing for open educational content (Seminar by Lila Bailey, ccLearn counsel)
- Review of licensing approaches of each case
Week 5 - Open web tech (on the horizon)
- Emerging open web technologies: canvas, video tag, etc. (Seminar by someone from Mozilla labs)
- Mozilla Labs experiments: Ubiquity, Weave, etc.
- Brainstorm: how could cases use technologies like these?
- Project presentations and review (ctd.)
- Participants and Mozilla/ccLearn/P2PU mentors review group projects and provide feedback
Week 6: Open learning
- Overview of approaches in participatory online learning
- Round-table conversation with George Siemens, David Wiley, and others (facilitated by Philipp Schmidt, P2PU)
- Review how cases are using participatory learning
- Final project presentations
- Group review of all projects
- Review / closing
Web seminar schedule
Web seminars are synchronous online seminars, which require Internet connectivity. We will be using WebEx to host the seminars and schedule the times to accommodate participation from around the world. Recordings will be posted here.
- Week 1: 2 April (Thu)
- Week 2: 9 April (Thu)
- Week 3: 14 April (Tue - project discussion)
- Week 3: 16 April (Thu)
- Week 4: 23 April (Thu)
- Week 5: 28 April (Tue - project discussion)
- Week 5: 30 April (Thu)
- Week 6: 5 May (Tue) - final project review)
- Week 6: 7 May (Thu)
Case studies
We will use four existing open education projects as case studies (follow link for short descriptions) throughout:
- David Humphrey: Mozilla@Seneca, looking at learning in a large open source community
- David Wiley: BYU open education course, where students from around the world participate online
- Jim Groom: Wordpress MU at University Mary Washington pioneers an open platform for course design
- TBA
Each case study will be introduced during week one. We will then look at the licensing, technology and teaching approaches of each case as we move through the seminars.
Practical assignment
On the sign up page, we ask you to submit description of a project that you'd like to work on during the six weeks of the course.
The idea is to come up with educational design ideas that apply the open content, open tech, and open pedagogy ideas discussed in the course. Possible project topics include:
- A plan or mockup for improving education.mozilla.org, Mozilla's emerging platform for educators (it's just a wiki now :)).
- A spec for turning Firefox into the 'educational platform for the future' by pulling together addons for specific education use cases
- A light-weight tool to integrate Web 2.0 services into one edu-platform, using things like RSS and sticky-tape
- An e-portfolio that follows students around the web, and can be used for recognition and assessment of their work on blogs, wikis, in discussion threads, etc.
Of course, you can also do a project built around a course or initiative that you plan to implement personally. The only thing we ask is that the project focus on something practical and real. It shouldn't just be an exercise.
There will be dedicated sessions during the course to discuss the projects, and mentors from Mozilla, ccLearn, and P2PU will provide feedback.
Online interaction and prep reading
- Student profiles, intro themselves in advance
- Audio interviews w/ each case study students can hear in advance
- Compile participants' blog feeds, and aggregate discussion in one central place
- Weekly live seminars
- Basic course outline and content on wiki
Approach
- Six weeks of online interactive talks using WebEx or DimDim. Archive on video.
- Talks presented by leading people from Mozilla, CC and other allies.
- Participants use concepts from talks to develop design ideas for EdMoz site.
- Participant and presenter community and interaction via mail list and IRC.
- Same as Labs Concept Series course model (do we want a similar intake model?)
Participants Sign Up Here
Participation is open to anyone with an interest in the open education platform of the future. We are asking participants to tell us a little bit about their backgrounds, and sketch out an idea for the project they'd like to work on during the course. We only have space for the first 20 people in the original course, but if interest is sufficient, we hope to run it again in the future.
If you would like to participate in this course, please sign up here.