student learners. Faculty and students will locate emerging resources, and craft a semester-long student experience which will yield student learning outcomes equivalent to a course in the individual faculty member's discipline. Faculty will contribute to and ensure the reliability of the sources, as well as the rigor and relevance of the project in comparison to the disciplinary guidelines for undergraduate learning. Each student will author an ePortfolio to demonstrate attainment of the appropriate outcomes for assessment, as well as to articulate the integration of their experience in to a lifelong personal learning plan.
4. PURPOSE
As new technology drives knowledge production and community online, and as information becomes more widely available, the role of learning institutions is shifting. Students, who used to need access and guidance to find scarce information, now require skills in navigating the vast and varied information accessible through their computers and cell phones. A tremendous opportunity accompanies this shift in students' needs: in all disciplines, the quantity of high quality, peer reviewed open educational resources is growing. But educators are often unaware of emerging materials and practices, or have difficulty assessing their quality. Further, the traditional culture of higher education fails to systematically encourage and reward faculty for integrating developing technology in the classroom, or it does so outside the context of the teaching and learning environment.
The Center will benefit several groups of stakeholders. Students will participate in and develop an inquiry-driven, learner-centered education environment, developing important technical and collaborative skills, and getting feedback from a broader audience than is available in a traditional classroom. Teachers will benefit from the ability to offer a broader range of learning opportunities in their curricula as they incorporate and promote learning practices discovered with student projects in the Center; they will also benefit from expanded opportunities to network within their disciplines. Benefits for higher education include globalizing its approach to knowledge creation and dissemination, improving its ability to teach in an electronic age, extending the benefits of knowledge networks to multiple disciplines, and developing models for effective teaching and learning with the ever-developing OER community. In addition, the Center will perform a public service: its various activities will work toward improving the online resources involved, by helping subject matter experts share their knowledge with wide audiences online and across national and cultural boundaries.
5. CONTEXT
COLT will build on a variety of existing efforts to improve and establish OER and OEP, including the following:
The OPAL educational quality initiative aims to broadly promote innovation and quality in education and training through the use of OER and OEP. Its site identifies several important initiatives in the development of OER, such as Open Courseware, MERLOT, and Rice University's Connexions. OPAL's focus is principally on Europe; and in contrast to COLT's network-based approach, it will establish a centralized resource, the European Union Open Educational Quality Clearinghouse [1].
More focused efforts to fuel the development of OEP include the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative and the AVO "Open Networks for Learning" project. The Wikipedia PPI was a pilot project, run by the Wikimedia Foundation, to facilitate assignments in which students write collaboratively on Wikipedia [2]. The project established sample lesson plans, print and online resources for Wikipedia-based collaboration, and a volunteer-driven support network. AVO, also known as "Open Networks for Learning," was a Finnish national project that engaged educational institutions, businesses, and public libraries to develop a guide on the use of wikis for teaching and content production, and also explored the use of the Wikiversity platform [3].
6. NEXT STEPS
COLT remains in the planning stages as it seeks funding for both stages of its project. Please contact the authors with expressions of interest in participation, especially at the research network level.
7. REFERENCES
- ↑ OPAL. The Open Education Quality Initiative. DOI= http://opal.innovationpros.net/the-opal-initiative/.
- ↑ Wikimedia Foundation. Public Policy Initiative. DOI= http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative.
- ↑ Online Educa Berlin. Creating Open Content on Wiki Library and Wikiversity – Lessons from Finland. DOI= http://www.icwe.net/oeb_special/news188.php. 10 November 2010.
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
WikiSym '11, Oct 03-05 2011, Mountain View, CA, USA
ACM 978-1-4503-0909-7/11/10.200
