10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should)

By Audrey Watters

This week, the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of OpenCourseWare. The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the materials from all 2,000 of the university’s courses on the Web.

With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described in her opening remarks at yesterday’s meeting as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: “the tradition of the global intellectual commons.”

We have looked here before at how OCW has shaped education in the last ten years, but in many ways much of the content that has been posted online remains very much “Web 1.0.” That is, while universities have posted their syllabi, handouts, and quizzes online, there has not been — until recently — much “Web 2.0″ OCW resources — little opportunity for interaction and engagement with the material.

But as open educational resources and OCW increase in popularity and usage, there are a number of new resources out there that do offer just that. You probably already know about: Khan Academy and Wikipedia, for example. But in the spirit of 10 years of OCW, here’s a list of 10 cool OER and OCW resources that you might not know about, but should know.

Continued at: http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/05/10-open-education-resources-you-may-not-know-about-but-should/

Visit MIT OpenCourseWare: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Changing the Way We Teach: An Interview with Michael Wesch

By Mary Grush

Each semester I face 200 to 400 students in a large university lecture hall. Each semester I ask them a simple question, “How many of you do not like school?” It is not uncommon for more than half of them to raise their hands. I follow with a slight variation on the question: “How many of you do not like learning?” No hands. We love learning, but dislike the institution we have created for it.

Continued at: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/05/01/changing-the-way-we-teach.aspx

Practical Strategies for Online Faculty Orientation

By Mary Bart

Regardless of how much teaching experience you have, there’s often a good measure of anxiety when you teach your very first online course. Beyond the pedagogical hurdles, you wonder if students will be able to tell that you’re new to the online classroom, whom you can turn to for tech support, and how you can be more efficient with your time.

At Penn State World Campus, new instructors have a three-part training program that includes online pedagogy, a tour of the Learning Management System (LMS), and an orientation on the nuts and bolts of teaching in an online classroom. The goal is to streamline the teaching and learning process, and minimize the learning curves for new instructors.

Continued at: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/distance-learning/practical-strategies-for-online-faculty-orientation/