OCW Consortium: UPDATE
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.
