Two major developments, which look like a sign of a major differentiation within UK HE, have been reported in the last month by the UK's Open University.
Firstly it has announced that it will partner with the University of Manchester (the UK's largest, formed last year by the merger of UMIST and Manchester University) to develop and offer combined degree programmes, "focussed initially on overseas student markets".
Secondly, that supported by a £2.56m grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, it will start to make its course materials freely available for reuse by teachers and students anywhere, paralleling MIT's OpenCourseWare (which continues to be part-funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation).
The following links provide some of the details, and in the continuation post there is a link to the OU's application to the Hewlett Foundation, including an extract containing one of the document's many references to Moodle, the Open Source VLE that the OU recently decided to use as its main platform.
Extract from the OU's application to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation [1.8 MB PDF].
As the work will have an equal focus on developing appropriate tools, there will be
collaboration with open source software projects. Chief amongst these will be working with Moodle, which will constitute the main learning environment (http://moodle.org/). Other collaborations may be instituted with the LAMS learning activity editor, which provides a means of developing and delivering learning activity sequences (http://www.lamsinternational.com/). In addition, open source projects such as the SAKAI initiative in the US, which seeks to develop an open architecture so that tools can communicate effectively with each other, will be relevant (http://www.sakaiproject.org/). Discussions were initiated at the Utah State University/Hewlett Foundation conference on inter-operability standards across open content tools and infrastructures. The Open University will contribute as an active partner to this effort. The adoption and development of appropriate educational technology standards will be important, particularly in the area of marking content so that it can be found and adapted easily. In this area, the University will continue to work closely with IMS (http://www.imsglobal.org/).
Hope this isn't another selection of course outlines, notes and reading lists. The MIT project was a huge let down - more to do with MIT marketing than useful academic content. I'd like to see a comparison between non-academic open resources, such as Wikipedia, and these over-funded and under-achieving academic attempts at learning content.
In the MIT case, as with the Encylopedia Britannica (written by academics), Wikipedia wins hands down. Jimmy Wales approach is anti-credentialist, “To me the key thing is getting it right. And if a person's really smart and they're doing fantastic work, I don't care if they're a high school kid or a Harvard professor; it's the work that matters.... You can't coast on your credentials on Wikipedia.... You have to enter the marketplace of ideas and engage with people." Hear, hear.
Posted by: Donald Clark | 30/03/2006 at 15:07
Was the MIT Open Courseware Initiative "a huge let down" and "overfunded and under-achieving"? I'd be interested in Donald's evidence for these assertions. Certainly the published feedback - of course this has been chosen to show OCW in a good light - gives a different impression.
And if you want to watch a series of brilliant introductory physics lectures, Wikipedia does not help you do that in the way that MIT's OCW does. (See, for example, this September 2003 extract from Fortnightly Mailing Number 22 for some links to examples of MIT OCW content.
Posted by: sschmoller | 30/03/2006 at 21:37