Having finally negotiated the administrative paperwork necessary to proceed, the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) has officially begun its open education initiative– uLearn– by becoming a member of the OpenCourseWare consortium (OCW). We don’t have a cool site to debut ala BC Campus’ Free Learning site (from which we plan to liberally crib) or even a single course put up yet! But we do have plans…

We at the UAF Center for Distance Education couldn’t spend much time on uLearn until it was approved and personnel time allotted, so the existing site is essentially just an announcement… but an announcement signaling an important step forward for UAF, representing a change in institutional philosophy about– and support for– open education. There is a strong moral imperative to embrace an open posture w/r/t learning– a force that is by itself reason enough for me. But we also needed to justify to others who will be providing resources for the project specifically why we wanted to join this growing movement and, more importantly, what we had to contribute.

I’ve written before about some of the reasons for joining the OCW and other open education resource (OER) efforts so I won’t belabor them there. But I do want to note a couple of specific offerings we intend to provide, many of which will be significant transformations of existing material or wholly new efforts whose development is guided by the fact that the materials are destined to be part of uLearn:

Information Fluency
You’ll be hearing much more about this topic from me as we are in the midst of developing a library science oriented curriculum for a beginner’s course in developing information fluency skills. Every day I become more convinced of the importance of information fluency as a framework for coherently understanding and integrating Connectivist learning theory, personal learning environments, emerging literacies, and social networks into our educational offerings.

iTeach Faculty Development Curriculum
Over the last five years of offering iTeach faculty development intensives in online teaching and learning we have developed a large amount of material for faculty who want to learn to teach better online and/or using contemporary social media and network tools.

Ocean Science Laboratory
At the Center for Distance Education we have developed one of a very few wholly web-based Ocean Science laboratory courses that will be– in its current configuration– particularly useful to faculty wishing to deliver a– or enhance an existing– ocean science course to distance students. Our geographic location and current events have demanded a particular emphasis on climate change, sea ice, and other circumpolar concerns that make this course unique. We hope to develop a version of this course that will be as useful to independent learners as it already is to those in a guided education environment.

Literature of Alaska and the Yukon Territory, Geography of Alaska
Obviously, these are areas in which the University of Alaska has a special interest– and existing, proven curriculum. Long term plans include sharing material from other geographic and institutional specialties: rural development, mining, arctic and petroleum engineering.

I think distance education programs, faculty, staff, and designers are a natural fit for open education resource initiatives, and we look forward to contributing to this important cause!

"Open Education" is a vast area with many different territories. "Open Learning" encompasses a diverse group with some strikingly dissimilar needs. An "Open Course" might refer to a list of readings, a "complete" course without instructor, or a guided course. And then at some point a course becomes large enough or guided enough or at least some kind of schedule is suggested and it becomes a "Massively Online Open Course".

Then there are those labels and titles of initiatives that seem to cut various slices of the open education pie: OCW, OER, OpenEd…

It’s a bewildering array of options that makes discussion about accreditation (amongst other topics) difficult because I, at least, am unsure what kind of open education is being discussed at any given time. If "Open Accreditation" is referring to ways in which to confer some kind of material value to the learner who has succeeded in an "Open Teaching" environment, the road to accreditation hacking Shangri-La is a bit less hazy– a slightly smaller step– than providing the same service to the independent learner. The biggest problem is that of assessment. In an open teaching class, there is at least someone who could conceivably perform, facilitate, or coordinate assessment activities… in the independent learning scenario there is no one in that role.