Blog Post #5 - Open Course Ware

This week's chapter in Bonk opened my eyes to just how much content and progress has been made in the movement to make education accessible and available to the masses.  It is also surprising and yet not so surprising that this information is being disseminated by some of the most prestigious schools like MIT and Yale. The mixed emotion stems from the fact that the information given is from an elite entity that is very selective about who walks onto campus each day to get the same information.  These groups also serve to be innovators and serving this information to the masses is definitely an innovating move.

Beyond these initial innovators, many places have stepped up to the challenge of changing dynamics and offering courses, programs, degrees and beyond.  A centralized site we looked at this week called the Online Education Database assists learners to find the content (http://oedb.org/). Beyond this, sites like Opensource Opensourceware Prototype System takes this content and increases accessibility and availability through translation to other languages (http://oops.editme.com/).  This is all with the support from an eccentric man that believes that knowledge should be open and accessible.


After seeing all of this information, it was inherent in me to compare the progress of these places with Lehigh and see how far my own university has gone with this movement.  While we are certainly not on the forefront, I think we are still fairly progressive from the aspect of opensource and opencourseware.  We have open iTunes courses, and other streamed content from sources like Biology.  The latest innovation is in the realm of Library resources, where we were chosen as one of several schools to assist with the production of an open library environment (Kuali Ole). For me, this is all proof that opensource and opencourseware is on our front door step, and its not going away anytime soon.  It will be interesting to see how universities create their niche is these changing environments.

Carly's PPT of Collaboration with Google Docs on Wiziq conference.