Participants in the Open Education project review session began with introductions including their horoscope signs (Western and Eastern) - quite an innovative introduction to an open education session. The session was facilitated by Delia and Ahrash who opened the discussion with a few proposals for a framework for the open education track moving forward. The session was a follow up to the introductions and goal-setting session where a number of issues had already been raised and projects mooted. The group took a decision to have project proposers present further on their projects to help the group understand them better.
The criteria was why people should care about the project and how the project benefits open education. Philipp Schmidt began talking about the benefits of his proposed project, Peer 2 Peer University, a bottom up and non-profit university project. Critical mass for a course would be 5 to 10 people with some of those people in the same time zone. Accreditation is really a continuum beginning with reputation in the open source community and working towards a more traditional type of accreditation based on the user's needs. Philipp said his preference would be for a person to develop a portfolio over a period of time. Some of the topics of interest included psychology and mathematics.
The next project was the Open Education Resources handbook. The project was discussed in the context of an iterative improvement system in the Open High School initiative in the State of Utah in the United States. The Open High School is state funded and works like any other public school on this basis. The process involves an ongoing cycle of review which enables students to constantly assess their performance and progress. Some of the issues that come up include the release of student data and how that data is handled. The response is to involve the community in an internal discussion about how to handle the data.
The OER Case Study Project, involves OER initiatives around the world and assistance with case studies on which issues those initiatives identify as they progress. The case study framework has helped a South African project called the Free High School Science Texts. The toolkit helps identify the issues and provide feedback for an ongoing review process to help the initiatives improve their own processes.
The next project, Connexions, is a learning object repository that allows for a high degree of flexibility. Users can compile the data into a variety of forms for a variety of purposes. Work on the Connexions site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
iKnow uses learning sciences to identify how people learn and focuses on English language learning in Japan. The project uses an application that helps people learn using active recall rather than multiple choice or other options. The learning language can be customised and has been used by government agencies. The service is funded by advertising revenue and is provided to its users for free. The benefits of new knowledge obtained through work with these agencies and other organisations are then passed along to the end users. The content will include iKnow's own content as well as their users' content.
There were a few other really interesting projects include an open Internet library being developed in Poland and an initiative by CC Israel to bring a range of stakeholders together to create a neutral framework for collaboration.
Opera Software has a string focus on web standards and their initiatives include the Opera Web Standards Curriculum which is designed to address a deficit of education about web standards. All articles are released under a CC BY NC SA 2.5 license. Opera collaborates with the Yahoo! Developer Network on this project.
Super Cool School is a project that runs as an application on Facebook with about 2000 users and roughly 200 classes. The learners give strong input on what they want to learn. The school doesn't issue degrees and focusses the review process on the teachers who are evaluated by the students. This sort of evaluation profile would fit in well with Philipp's proposal for a form of online profile. The school is working on its own website which will be launched soon. There are challenges facing the Facebook application model, namely the facts that some schools block Facebook, people tend not to take Facebook applications very seriously and slower adoption rates for Facebook applications.
