Richard Nantel

Last month, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University announced its annual Berkman Awards for outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society. One of the winners this year was Rice University’s Richard Baraniuk.

Professor Baraniuk won the award for launching Connexions, a public learning content management system (LCMS) that allows teachers to share digital resources and learning content, modify them as required, and provide them online under a Creative Commons license. This free, open-source platform is a building block toward a system of open educational resources.

The content in Connexions is presented in two formats:

• Modules, which are like small “knowledge chunks,” or learning objects
• Collections, groups of modules structured into books or course notes or for other uses

The site reports that it presently contains “5,690 reusable modules woven into 339 collections” and covers a very wide range of topics of interest to anyone. Readers of this blog may benefit from the following courses on the topic of learning and technology:

• Best Practices in Online Teaching – Pulling It All Together – Teaching Blended Learning Courses (m15048)
• Best Practices in Online Teaching – During Teaching – Promote Active Learning (m14977)
• Learning Design and Open Source Teaching (m14733)
• Building a Learning Community: Democratic Values (m12921)

Many more courses on online learning are available here.

Mr. Baraniuk spoke at TEDS back in 2006 about how digital learning content such as that found in Connexions will replace academic textbooks. His talk was titled “Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning.” A video of this presentation is available here.

My last post was about MIT’s OpenCourseware Project, which contains more than 2,000 free online courses on a wide range of subjects, including architecture, urban studies, athletics, physics, and much much more.

Zooming out to get a broader view gives you a sense of just how big the universe of free courseware is. MIT is just one of hundreds of universities that make their online courses freely available as part of the OpenCourseware Consortium.

How big is the OpenCourseware Consortium? There are 220 universities participating… IN CHINA ALONE! In all, nearly 300 world-class universities have put courses online for all to access freely.

In browsing through English language courses, I came across a number of courses from the United Kingdom’s Open University that are likely of interest to those who read this blog:

• Accessibility of eLearning
• Teaching using digital video in secondary schools
• Play, learning, and the brain

It’s been seven years since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched its OpenCourseware project. The goal of the initiative has been to:

“…advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the world.”

Since then, this repository has grown to include more than 2,000 free online courses. The site is currently getting a million hits per month.

I’m looking forward to taking the 9.0 Introduction to Psychology course this week.