School of Open

School of Open launching this week!!



Courses that will launch March 12, 2013

• A Look at Open Video - Overview of open video for students interested in developing software, video journalists, editors and all users of video who want to take their knowledge further.
• Open data for GLAMs - This challenge is for GLAM-professionals who are interested in opening up their data as free culture data.
• Contributing to Wikimedia Commons - This challenge gets you acquainted with uploading your works to the commons - a repository of openly licensed images from all over the world.
• dScribe: Peer-produced Open Educational Resources - Learn the ins and outs of building OER together with your peers.
• Open Science: An Introduction - A course for both seasoned and new researchers who want to learn what makes science "open", how they can find/use/build on open scientific works, and share their contributions back to the commons.
• Copyright 4 Educators (Aus) - A course for educators in Australia who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing.
• Copyright 4 Educators (US) - A course for educators in the US who want to learn about copyright law.
• Creative Commons for K-12 Educators - A course for elementary educators who want to find and adapt free resources for their classes, and incorporate activities that teach their students digital world skills.
• Open Detective - This course will explore the scale of open to non-open content and how to tell the difference.
• Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond - A course on how to edit Wikipedia articles, focusing on articles covering the open educational resources (OER) movement.
• Get a CC license. Put it on your website - A short challenge on applying the CC license of your choice to your website so that it aligns with marking and metadata best pracdtices.
• Open habits: making with the DS106 Daily Create - An hourlong challenge about building openness into your daily routine so that you're thinking about new ways to share and participate in the culture of openness.
• Intro to Openness in Education - This is an introductory course exploring the history and impacts of openness in education.

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The Age of the MOOC

More and more MOOCs of varing formats are appearing all the time and if you haven't come across one yet then it is time to check it out!!

A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a course where the participants are distributed and course materials also are dispersed across the web. This is possible only if the course is open, and works significantly better if the course is large.

Wikipedia




Presented By: Online Colleges

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Google Code University

Google Code University is a very useful resource providing

sample course content and tutorials for Computer Science (CS) students and educators on current computing technologies and paradigms.

Study introductory courses or more advanced specialized topics.

Adding it to my list of other current online offerings, which include codecademy and udacity

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Learning Statistics with Udacity

An appeal from Udacity tutor Professor Thrun

I am writing you to ask a personal favor. I am trying to break the student record for the largest online class ever taught with my new class "Intro to Statistics", which will begin June 25th. Sign up, forward this e-mail to your friends and family and let's set a new record!

We've also launched a challenge for high school students. Winners will get a trip to Stanford University and I will be delighted to give a tour of my lab!

Thanks,
Sebastian Thrun, Professor

Sounds goood - learn something about statistics and be part of a record breaking adventure!!! Why not sign up now! I have :) Previous Udacity record comes in at 160,000 learners.

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A Bold Experiment in Distributed Education

"A bold experiment in distributed education" or the future of education??
Currently, 114,563 plus 1 have signed up!!!

"Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" will be offered free and online to students worldwide during the fall of 2011. The course will include feedback on progress and a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, the curriculum draws from that used in Stanford's introductory Artificial Intelligence course. The instructors will offer similar materials, assignments, and exams.

Also available this year - Stanford's Introduction to Databases and Introduction to Machine Learning.

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Free Moodle Hosting With e-Socrates

e-Socrates aims to create "the best free Moodle hosting service for everyone who wants to do e-learning activities".

You can create a course and "have the full moodle power in your hands, without restrictions of any kind!" including being able to track your students subscriptions and setting a password for the course enrolment.

In order to use the site you must "always allow website visitors the right to read your contents, you can prevent them from subscribing as students but you can't prevent them from accessing the material".

This is the only "fee" required by e-Socrates in exchange for the free hosting service.

Currently there are over 500 courses available in different languages including Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Croatian, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Vietnamese and Sanskrit.

Lots of sharing going on here :)

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Training Material for IT Certification

The Mobile Classroom, by James Messer, is a great ICT resource providing videos to help you with some of your most common questions about personal computer technology. The content is aimed at anyone who has a connection to the Internet.



James also provides specialized video training material for some IT industry certifications including CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, Microsoft 70-680 and Nmap at his Professor Messer website.

These videos run approximately from ten to twenty minutes and are all hosted on Professor Messer'sYoutube Channel.

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Education Futures Course Starting Soon

There is a nice opportunity for some online professional development coming up shortly.

The Education Futures Open Course will be starting on 19th April 2010 and will run for 8 weeks. Dave Cormier and George Siemens, who are running the course as part of  the Certificate in Emerging Technology for the University of Manitoba, explain what it is all about:

What is the next wave of technological change? What can educators do to prepare and anticipate trends? Using a method called “future thinking,” this course will look at a variety of trends and provide a series of potential scenarios and future directions. Participants will be actively involved in tracking critical trends, exploring their educational impact, and plan for ways to prepare for important changes.

Being an Open Course anyone can join in as Dave and George examine the possible futures for education! Time permitting, count me in. :-) How about you????

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Programming and Game Development Course

I have just signed up for the Kodu Game Lab Course which started this Monday and will run for the next five weeks. The course will go through many aspects of game design using Kodu Game Lab, a programming platform developed by Microsoft.

Interestingly, the course has been designed as a 'connectivist' one influenced by the work of Stephen Downes and George Siemens and the desire “that the knowledge in this course emerges as a result of the connections among the [participants] … and is not some ‘content’ shoveled from experts to recipients”.

Looking forward to seeing how it works out. The 'connectivist' model may well prove to be a viable model for this 'Internet era' that we live in!

Oh and it is still not too late to sign up for the Kodu Game Lab Course :-)

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Computer & Language Open Content Courses

Open-Of-Course provides a selection of multilingual online courses and tutorials, using the Moodle VLE, with the focus on educational information that benefits daily life.

The available courses relate to computers, the Internet and learning languages. For anyone interested in these areas, there is certainly lots to choose from.

I found the course covering the ECDL syllabus with Open Office, all be it older versions of both, to be quite useful.

However, there is no date on the site, so it is hard to tell just how up to date the materials are. Also, some of the links within the modules are broken but, having said this, there is still lots of useful information and links provided at Open-Of-Course.

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