Education/EduCourse/Outline

Logistics

• We will keep the course outline, links to all content, and assignments on this page
• Participants profiles and project ideas are stored on the Participants page
• Each week, we'll have an online seminar using WebEx, covering the three broad topics of the course (recordings of all seminars will be made available here). You will get an invitation by email to each seminar!
• For questions and discussion we use the course mailing list. All participants are subscribed automatically.
• Participants are encouraged to share bookmarks. If you use www.diigo.com you can post directly into the course group, if you are using del.icio.us, please tag resources as MozOpenEdCourse.
• There is also a general IRC channel for Mozilla education discussions, but keep in mind that the channel is not exclusively focused on this course (#education on irc.mozilla.org)

Web-seminar times

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 on this page.

NOTE: The following locations and UTC don't all match the resource shared.

All seminars, except week 2, run in the following time-slot:

• 8 am US West Coast UTC -7
• 11 am US East Coast UTC -4
• 16 pm Most of Europe UTC +1
• 17 pm South Africa UTC+2
• 20.30 India UTC +5.5
• 23.00 Philippines UTC +8
• 4am Otago/NZ UTC +13

The week 2 seminar will be held at the following time:

• 12 noon US West Coast UTC -7
• 15 pm US East Coast UTC -4
• 20 pm Most of Europe UTC +1
• 21 pm South Africa UTC+2
• 00.30 India UTC +5.5
• 3 am Philippines UTC +8
• 8 am Otago/NZ UTC +13

Week 1 - Intro

• Web-seminar 2 April 2009
• Introduction to the course (Mark Surman, Frank Hecker, Ahrash Bissell, Philipp Schmidt)
• Week 1 serves as an introduction to the course content and logistics, and clarify any questions about the projects. Mark and Frank (Mozilla Foundation) will speak about the overall concept of Mozilla Education and how this course fits into it. Ahrash Bissell (Creative Commons, ccLearn) will provide some background on Creative Commons' education activities. Philipp Schmidt (UWC, P2PU) will run through the logistics of the course, and how we will work together in the next 6 weeks.
• We will then discuss the project and blueprint ideas, how to develop them over the next few weeks, and what we hope participants will get out of the course.
• Tasks for Week 1 (complete these prior to the seminar):
  • Create an account on this Mozilla wiki (https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup)
  • Review the participant profiles: (Participants)
  • Update your own participant profile on that same page, and add any information that is missing
  • Look at the proposed blueprint ideas and find some that are similar to yours
  • Use the mailing list to suggest collaboration (if you want to work on a project together with someone else) or just leave comments and feedback
  • Create a www.diigo.com or del.icio.us account to share bookmarks with the group. If you use diigo, you can post directly into the course group if you use del.icio.us, please tag resources as MozOpenEdCourse.

Week 2 - Open content (open educational resources)

• Web-seminar 8 April 2009
• Overview of what's happening in the world of OER (Seminar by Ahrash Bissell, ccLearn)
• Panel discussion of case studies with Jim Groom, Dave Humphrey, Wayne Mackintosh and David Wiley.
• Tasks for Week 2 (complete these prior to the seminar)
  • Review the background materials on the Case Studies page
  • Listen to the interviews with David Wiley, Jim Groom, Dave Humphrey, and Wayne Mackintosh and hear them speak about their projects (the audio files can be downloaded from the case-study page)
  • Prepare a question for the panel that connects what you are trying to do in your blueprint with something that happened in a case-study. Send your question to the mailing list. We'll address some of the questions during the online seminar, and discuss the rest by email.
  • Decide how you will develop your blueprint (see the end of this page for more info), and either create a page on this wiki or set it up somewhere else. Your blueprint home is where you can document progress, store screen-shots or mock-ups and share your ideas. Make sure you link to your blueprint home from the Participants page.
  • Note: we encourage people to join together into project groups, and even to work on collaborative projects if they like. This groups need to form the and projects need to be written up before week 2 seminar.

Week 3 - Open web tech (basics)

• Web-seminar 16 April 2009
• What makes the web open? What makes it closed? (Seminar by Mozilla's Chris Blizzard)
• Educators teaching online are constantly faced with technology choices. Which technologies are open, and which are closed? What are the implications of open or closed for access and participation - today, and in the long-run? Starting with a discussion of technologies relevant for all web-based education (JavaScript, CSS, etc.) we will unpack some of the bigger issues connected to the choice of technology.

Week 4 - Open content (licensing)

• Web-seminar 23 April 2009
• Licensing for open educational content (Seminar by Lila Bailey, ccLearn counsel)
• Copyright, Creative Commons GNU. Re-use, re-mix, re-purpose, re-distribute. ShareAlike, Non-Commercial, Attribution only. So many options. Lila will lead us through the licensing jungle, explain why the licensing choices we make impact the usefulness of our materials, and what we need to know about using other peoples' resources.

Week 5 - Open web tech (on the horizon)

• Web-seminar TBA
• Emerging open web technologies: canvas, video tag, etc. (Seminar by Ben Galbraith, and Dion Almaer from Mozilla labs)
• In week 3 we spoke about some basic technology choices. Now it's time to look to the future. What will be possible 6 or 12 months from now? We will discuss foundational technologies that expand what web-browsers will allow us to do (like canvas 2D and 3D, video and audio HTML tags) and look at things that go beyond basic browser support, including firefox plug-ins and webservices and Mozilla Labs experiments like Ubiquity and Weave.

Week 6 - Open learning and pedagogy

• Web-seminar 5 May
• Overview of approaches in participatory online learning. Round-table conversation with George Siemens, Jason B. Jones, David Wiley, and others (facilitated by Philipp Schmidt, University of the Western Cape/ P2PU). We will mostly speak about projects that the panelists have been involved in, but also review how case studies have implemented open pedagogy.
  • George Siemens, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge
    In fall of 2008, George Siemens and Stephen Downes offered an online course - Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08) - in an open teaching model. Over 20 learners enrolled in the course for credit and over 2300 learners participated in the course without fee (and without credit). The course pioneered the concept of massive open online courses (MOOC). Lectures, discussions, and guest presentations were accessible to all learners. CCK08 was designed to account for existing online activities of learners. While a centralized learning space was established in Moodle, learners were encouraged to blog, podcast, meet in Second Life (and face-to-face). Patterns of interaction, as well as reactions of participants to increased need for sensemaking and wayfinding through networks, offer a potential model for future online courses. MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism and http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/ - Book: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wikis/KnowingKnowledge/index.php/Main_Pag - Handbook: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wikis/etl/index.php/Handbook_of_Emerging_Technologies_for_Learning
  • Jason B. Jones
    
• Closing Seminar 7 May 2009
  • During week 6 we will also have a final round of project reviews, with feedback and input, and close the course off.

Assignment: Project or Product Blueprints

Participants submitted project ideas that they'd like to work on during the six weeks of the course.

The idea was to come up with blueprints that apply open content, open tech, and open pedagogy practices (as they are discussed in the course) to a project you feel passionate about.

At the end of the course, we'd like all participants to have completed a blueprint that describes how they might implement their idea. There are no restrictions to the form this could take - build a mock-up, draw on a napkin and take a photograph, create an entirely new web application from scratch, make a video that highlights the concept -- all we ask is that the projects are real. The seminars and discussions in the course will help you figure out how to apply open to your project idea - and we hope that after the course you'll feel well prepared to take your blueprint and build it.

Some of the original examples we could think of included:

• 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.
• A "universal", but customizable, tool for marking and tagging works that lives in the browser, autofills info from any page of interest, and gathers user-input structured data about OER, to be then deposited into a linked OER archive.
• A tool for rendering wiki-text into more compelling visual formats.
• Infrastructure for "hierarchical" wikis, since most people tend to think in "nested" forms (think of folders within folders), but wikis don't inherently lend themselves to such logic. There are of course many benefits to not being constrained by such logic, but if we could get the best of both worlds...

There will be dedicated sessions during the course to discuss the projects, and mentors from Mozilla, ccLearn, and P2PU will provide feedback.

Assignments can be done alone or in groups. If you want to work in a group, we can help you find people working on a similar topic. Groups can collaborate on a single idea as a team, or simply offer peer support on each others' ideas.