Thanks for responses to our first Monday pulse poll – the results indicate much more multilingual capability than your humble poll maker.
This week, we ask about Open CourseWare (OCW) (Wikipedia ref, defines as “course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet.”
OCW was a primary focus of the original organization that evolved to be Open Education Global, starting in 2008 as the Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC), influence much by the leadership of MIT OCW.
Not too many poll takers here, but that’s how they go. If you have ideas for better polls, you know where to find me.
Just for fun, I was digging through my web archives, and found reference to the Foothill-DeAnza Community College 2004 vintage Sofia project (Sharing Of Free Intellectual Assets) aiming to provide community college OCW in the spirit of MIT. Sofia can be explored via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine including the gallery of 8 example courses. All were shared under a version 1.0 Creative Commons CC BY-NC license which at the time, CC licenses were only 2 years old
I see that the Wikipedia article for Open Educational Resources doesn’t mention the Sofia project at all. Not sure if Sofia would merit a WP entry of its own but certainly a mention in the ‘history’ part of the WP article mentioned above. I’d be happy to add something (unless someone else has something already in the works?)
I’m conceptually understanding of Wikipedia and know there is a criteria for significance, so can appreciate that it does not merit an article. I thought maybe more appropriate in the article on Open CourseWare but see perhaps a lot of needs/issues on that article (the conflating of MOOCs and OCW? the listing for the Americas by linking to articles for an institution).
I’d really be keen to mobilize through OEGlobal some kind of organized effort to improve many of the articles related to Open Education. It’s come up here before, can we create a Wikipedia Open Education Squad?
(It was also the name of a custom Student Information System which was meant for Quebec-wide adoption in colleges, though I think that was spelled “Sophia”. What took over is a proprietary system called Clara, by Skytech Communications.)
And the OER, please? Where is the OER? Oh, I have the OER
I’m still parsing what I learned in a recent Wikidata workshop, but there are ways to cross connect things, even making Wikidata queries that leverage external systems (okay I have a lot to learn), but OCLC WorldCat IDS are a Wikidata property
Hearing those project names Sophia and Clara, reminded me of Rachel (Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning), another project, in this case using open technologies.
