Carol Gering

I’ve selected nine courses to review for my graduate studies project.  I mentioned in an earlier post that open courseware (OCW) initiatives can be broadly categorized into 3 groups:

1. Those that focus on publishing documents and artifacts from classroom courses (epitomized by MIT)
2. Those that focus on the cognitive science of interaction between students and content (epitomized by OLI at Carnegie Mellon)
3. Those that incorporate social interaction between students as a key element of course design (epitomized by OpenLearn at The Open University)

As outlined in my proposal, I’ve selected 3 courses from each of these groups. I briefly considered selecting the same course (or a rough approximation) in each of the 3 categories, but quickly realized that was impractical. As a compromise, I selected a beginning language course from each of the categories. I selected languages that I’ve never studied, and I selected three different languages (so that anything I learned in one ocw course wouldn’t influence my review of the other two courses). The additional courses were chosen either because they interested me personally, or because they have potential relevance for CDE course development. I looked at each of the courses deeply enough to verify that they contained a significant amount of content.   Here’s the list:

1. Chinese I—MIT
2. French—OLI
3. Spanish: Espacios publicos—OpenLearn
4. Physics of Atmospheres and Oceans—MIT
5. Logic & Proofs—OLI
6. Exploring data: Graphs and numerical summaries—OpenLearn
7. The Nature of Creativity—MIT (Linguistics and Philosophy)
8. Economics—OLI
9. Reading Visual Images—OpenLearn (Social Sciences)

Snapmania has a web-based tool for removing unwanted people from your photos. Titled Tourist Remover, it promises to clean up your vacation shots. Take multiple photos of a monument or landmark—ignoring passing cars and people. Upload your photos into Tourist Remover, and presto! The web-based tool identifies which things stay the same in all photos and which things change, then removes the transient elements.

This tool has been around for awhile…I just hadn’t come across it yet. Sure, you could do the same thing in Photoshop, but not in such an automated fashion.

I met with my committee yesterday and received approval on my proposal—now I’m officially beginning the project! As a short, one-sentence description of the study: I’m exploring the implementation of various open courseware projects, with an eye toward a “best fit” for CDE. The final product will be a recommendation document that outlines a practical way for CDE to launch an open courseware project, including software packages, overall design of the learning space, course features, and interaction spaces.I’m particularly interested in course designs that offer significant learning opportunities for individuals. Based on my initial literature review, existing open courseware projects can be divided into 3 major categories:

1. Those that focus on publishing documents and artifacts from classroom courses
2. Those that focus on the cognitive science of interaction between students and content
3. Those that incorporate social interaction between students as a key element of course design

I’m predisposed to believe the second and third types of open courseware are most useful for individuals and self-learners. I’m especially interested in finding a way to implement effective strategies for social interaction in a self-paced, stand-alone study environment.As I begin the project, I’ll post updates here—on Rhetorica—for anyone who’s interested in following my progress.