When it was announced in April 2001 MIT's Open Courseware initiative certainly caught the attention of the world. The project delivered its first material on 30 September 2002. At the time of writing, the learning materials for 900 MIT courses are now available online with learning material for 2000 courses slated for 2008. But we all know (don't we?) that a load of content online, no matter how prestigious the source, does not e-learning make; a fact recognized by David Wiley's Open Learning Support (OLS) project, a pilot research project launched last April in collaboration with MIT. I thought I would drop in on OLS (virtually speaking) to see what appears to be going on. David Wiley the OLS Executive Director, based at Utah State University, describes the OLS mission as:
“Libraries evolved into universities for a specific reason. High-quality content is essential to facilitating learning, but so are the social activities of asking, answering, debating, arguing, and negotiating. The mission of Open Learning Support is to give additional educational value to existing open content projects.”
Seven of MIT's OpenCourseWare subjects are being supported by OLS at this time with a user voting system being used to prioritize support for other MIT subjects. Support translates into:
“… learning communities where individuals around the world can connect with each other, collaborate, form study groups, and receive support for their use of MIT OCW materials in formal and informal educational settings.”
There is no access to faculty either at MIT or Utah State University and no award provision.
At the time of writing the OLS site shows 757 registered users and 185 postings over the seven subject areas. Linear Algebra seems to be the most active forum (78 postings) with an Introduction to Optimization being the least active (8 postings). Even if you are not a mathematician the content of the Linear Algebra forum is worth a look. Why? Because it certainly gives the impression of having the beginnings of a supportive 'on topic' self-organizing community. Introduction to Optimization, however, has it's 8 postings spread over April, June and September and gives the distinct impression of being a plant in need of water. Mind you, this is fascinating research material why do some communities thrive whereas others wither and die?
Gilly Salmon's 5 stage model comes to mind here? Auricle readers following this link should be aware that Gilly has now left the UK OU to take up a new Chair as Professor of E-Learning and Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester in the UK.
