I had a great meeting with Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the OCW Consortium. The OCW Consortium represents over 250 colleges and universities that contribute free and open courses (lecture notes, videos, tests, quizzes etc.). She had a number of helpful thoughts for NIXTY that build upon what Mike Caulfield outlined and take things to a new level.

Overall, she was quite positive about NIXTY. She readily saw the big picture of what we are trying to accomplish and thought the system was intuitive and easy-to-use. She indicated that it was great that we are going to launch with close to 100 open courses and thought we had a solid strategy in place. She also had a number of suggestions that would make the service better. These include:

-    Deliberately create a tutor community. OCWs are great, but having people guide you through the courses can really unlock them and make them more accessible.

-    Create a dashboard/metrics for OCW reuse and user type/demographics

-    Begin our OCW build out with the most popular courses and be deliberate about diversifying course content and institution.

-    Click for credit – provide a list of colleges (e.g., Western Governor’s University) that can provide credit for knowledge gained using OCW. For example, you finish English 101 OCW. At the end, there is a list of colleges that provide assessments corresponding to their requirements for English 101. If requirements are passed, then the individual can get credit for their knowledge.

-    Support Developing World OCW – create an easy way for academic institutions in the developing world to publish their content.

We look very forward to becoming a member of OCW Consortium. Courses created/published in NIXTY will have the option of being categorized as OCW. We are delighted to be a contributing member of this growing community.

Had a great meeting in Cambridge with Dr. Iiyoshi the other day. He is the editor/author of Opening Up Education, which is available for free here. We talked about his work at the Carnegie Foundation and his heart for helping educators become better teachers. I shared the NIXTY vision with him and he immediately understood what we are doing and then offered insight and advice as to how we can make it even better. At Carnegie, Dr. Iiyoshi spearheaded a program called the Knowledge Media Lab. One of the goals of the Knowledge Media Lab was to advance teaching scholarship (a.k.a. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) and promote educational knowledge building and sharing with Web 2.0 technologies. They did this by helping create digital representations of exemplary teaching practices and educational improvement efforts by and for educators, celebrating great teachers (they even had an online Educator Hall of Fame called the Gallery of Teaching and Learning, and providing various online tools and resources to help educators excel in their teaching and student learning. At MIT, he is now helping build similar tools and resources such as the Gallery of Educational Innovation. In our discussion about NIXTY, it quickly became apparent that the NIXTY platform could be used to reach some of these same goals.

We do not want NIXTY to simply be a place to find great content. Rather, we want NIXTY to be the premier place to find great content AND great teaching. We drilled down a bit more and started to find ways we could practically reach this goal of excellence in teaching. Initial thoughts include pointing to stellar teachers as examples. This would include examples of open courses that expert teachers develop. Reviewing these work examples will help other educators learn how to better communicate in residential, blended, and online environments. We also discussed ways of including tips in the process of building out a course. For example, if an instructor uploads a set of slides, then an information box could pop out and query them as to a best practice in PowerPoint presentations. These types of tips could be strategically placed throughout the course development process. The goal here is to better the process and method of course development. Another way would be to promote student teaching. The hard division between learners and educators is weakening and NIXTY will help this along by providing a real peer2peer platform. We could start by focusing on teaching assistants and graduate students.

Overall, it was a very enlightening discussion. MIT is fortunate to have Dr. Iiyoshi on board. I count myself as blessed and fortunate to be able to work with him in our future efforts.

Just had a great meeting with Mike Caulfield. He helped me better understand the OCW World and highlighted ways that NIXTY could help address some of the challenges that OCW faces. Before jumping into some of the steps that we can take, let me first sketch out the NIXTY system, so you can see these steps in context.

NIXTY is a global learning platform that provides free and premium ePortfolios, courses, CEs and learning management systems. Institutions can launch a private LMS/CMS just like they would from another commercial or open source LMS/CMS provider. Additionally, there is a public/open side where anyone can launch a course.

Now, back to the main point, NIXTY can take the following steps to better align with the OCW world.

1. Integrate the OCW banner into course development - when a person launches a course on NIXTY, we can make it very easy for them to make it a OCW.

2. Provide metrics on OCW reuse - if a person creates an OCW on NIXTY, then we can make it very easy for people to reuse that content in other courses. Additionally, we track course content at the micro-level, so if people port content out of a OCW course and reuse it in another course, then we can provide them with an overall dashboard to track macro and micro OCW course content.

3. Help faculty convert course content published in their institution’s LMS to OCW content and publish it on the public side of NIXTY so that it is easily accessible. For example, I’m a professor at X University. I build my course out in my institution’s private NIXTY LMS. When it is done I see a button that says “publish as OCW and make available on Web”. If I press that button, then my course content falls under the OCW banner and gets published on the open/public side of NIXTY. As an aside, we are not yet common cartridge compliant, but will be in the near future (we have the common catridge engine built, but it is not yet integrated with NIXTY).

4. Make NIXTY courses publicly accessible to the OCW Consortium search tool, so that content can readily be found/integrated/exported.

These are a few steps that we can take. If you have additional recommendations, then please let me know. You can email me: glen at nixty.com.