Just in time to celebrate Open Education Week, here comes a new initiative, the School of Open, a learning environment focused on increasing our understanding of “openness” and the benefits it brings to creativity and education in the digital age.
Developed by the collaborative education platform Peer to Peer University (P2PU) with organizational support from Creative Commons, the School of Open aims to spread understanding of the power of this brave new world through free online classes.
We hear about it all the time: Universal access to research, education and culture—all good things, without a doubt—made possible by things like open source software, open educational resources and the like.
But what are these various communities and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved?
School of Open has rolled the conversation back to square one so that understanding the basics is easy. Through a list of new courses created by users and experts, people can learn more about what “openness” means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone courses on copyright, writing for Wikipedia, the collaborative environment of open science, and the process behind making open video.
These free courses start March 18 (sign up by clicking the “start course” button by Sunday, March 17):
- Copyright 4 Educators (US)
- Copyright 4 Educators (AUS)
- Creative Commons for K-12 Educators
- Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond
These free courses are open for you to take at any time:
- Get a CC license. Put it on your website
- Open Science: An Introduction
- Open data for GLAMs
- Intro to Openness in Education
- A Look at Open Video
- Contributing to Wikimedia Commons
- Open Detective
The approach at P2PU encourages people to work together, assess one another’s work, and provide constructive feedback. It’s a great place to learn how to design your own course, because the design process is broken down step-by-step, and course content is vetted by users and P2PU staff. The tutorial shows you how the process works.
P2PU is also a place to learn more about what is open content and what is not. Participants in the ongoing course Open Detective learn to identify open source media and then demonstrate mastery by making something of their own using only open content. What if you’re really, really proud of the resource you create in Open Detective? Take it to the next level and get a Creative Commons license to make your work available without giving up full copyright. You guessed it, there’s a course for that too.
Open Education Week is in full swing (through Monday the 18th). There’s a full schedule of webinars to check out, including discussions about the implications of open access for political structures like the World Bank, and the impact of open, global teaching in Syria.
Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Visit her website at katerixwriter.com.