AcademiX - Open: The New Deal for Education

(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

Open: The New Deal for Education
Dr Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean & Director,
Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT), MIT

Gathering storm of open ed movement and it’s potential for transformation

Movement characterized by open content, open tech, open knowledge

Shout-out to Social Life of Info [my favorite library school read]

Open courseware – almost 2000 at MIT. Two remarkable things when initiative announced: first: whoa, this is big. Second: none of us knew what it meant.

(Side benefit: figuring out how many courses they had.)

Benefit for educators: saving time and lowering stress

Benefit for students: students elsewhere can check out notes for better understanding
Open courses also serve as model, benchmark

We typically think of higher ed with this stuff, but there are notable K-12 efforts

MIT has “highlights for high school” open courseware channel featuring material that might be of use/interest to that group.

(the preceding section is “Metaversity Part I”, more about content, stand alone stuff)

Metaversity Part II: Harvesting the Collective Advantage

Examples in this section launched from MIT, but involve other players

MIT Online Laboratories
iLab provides access to actual labs via internet—not simulations

Communities form to discuss results

Transformative dimension: iLabs not just about making equipment available, alters econ of lab instruction—equipment is expensive (equipment, time, etc). iLab provides potential for 24/7 access. You must believe first-hand lab instruction important to education experience

MIT students have access to labs elsewhere too

Research tools for learning

Spoken lecture browser (lecture browser – spoken language systems)
idea is to search lectures to get relevant snippets

Shakespeare performance in Asia video presentations is another app of this

MIT Visualizing Cultures - http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/index.html

Wonderful to have various apps, many repositories, but need to bring them together

This isn’t just about e-learning, but also national efforts.
India National Knowledge Commission Recommendations for Open Education Resources (OER)
http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/oer.asp

Open ed movement offers way around problem in India of insufficient schools (could build a school a day and not catch up)

Indo-US Collaboration of Engineering Education (IUCEE)
http://www.iucee.org/

OER value proposition
• open high quality digitized content, tools, communities
• available anytime, anywhere, free
• localizable and remixable
• allows for collective improvement and feedback
• alternate way to learn: accelerate/deepen learning
• scaling excellence
(also allows a lot of feedback to improve on what you do)

“We know how to share our research, but not how to share our pedagogy”

Open Ed vision elements – two important dimensions it enables
1. Blended learning - intelligent combination of physical and virtual
2. Boundary-less ed – beyond geo-political, off campus, research teaching, disciplines, etc.

This is not a pipe dream--however you interpret pipe!

MIT Council on Ed Tech Strategic thrust
promote active learning
bolster… [missed catching this slide, but it was good]

Collectivity culture expressed by what we see (web 2.0 logos slide)

Group of Gen Y students who want to work for NASA, belief about the NASA culture they want to work with, their set of slides. (Why isn’t a whole generation connecting to NASA?)

Q: Are there opportunities for open learning coming out of stimulus bill? A: we think so – variety of responses from institutions. (tongue in cheek – tell your legislators!) Q followup: any particular leaders supporting this? A: great awareness of possibilities, industry leaders, people of influence serving on various boards, Hewlett and Carnegie foundations as champions of open education.