We used Elluminate to connect everybody and as a presented it was a really interesting experience. I am pretty comfortable now making presentations over video conferencing. However, with Elluminate you really need to multi-task since there is are plenty of options for audience interaction.

They can raise their hands for questions, give you a smiley face or thumbs down, or you can poll their opinions. It is all pretty seamless, but takes some getting used to.

We were looking to have excellent moderators from the UH College of Education – Peter Leong and Adam Tanners – who basically kept an eye on things. Thanks so much fro this valuable experience!

The report is the output of deliberations by a community of 600 interested stakeholders from across the globe who corresponded via a mailing list between 2005 and 2007 (how time flies!). The UNU was one member of this community.

I am really impressed by both the report and the way that UNESCO has developed this project – it is community based, interactive and uses open technologies, such as wikis. In my view, this is a good model for other United Nations sponsored projects.

I borrowed the slide from the Open Content Holistic Research Environment blog.

“Minds of Fire; Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0.”

I especially like the circle of knowledge building and sharing diagram on creating, using and remixing that forms part of an open knowledge exchange zone (see picture)!

They also argue that we are witnessing the emergence of emergence of “new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.”

The continue by stating that ..”this new form of learning begins with the knowledge and practices acquired in school but is equally suited for continuous, lifelong learning that extends beyond formal schooling. Indeed, such an environment might encourage students to readily and happily pick up new knowledge and skills as the world shifts beneath them.”

Oh yes, we have been customizing existing plug-ins like polyglot (for multi-lingual blogs) and building new ones to handling quizzes and slideshows. We are going to post them soon as a contribution back to the Wordpress community. We have also made it possible for people to download the entire course, upload it to their own Wordpress site or just run it locally. This allows them to totally customize the course.

I like the related comment regarding the use of Wordpress for course development from

Brian Lamb

in his posting “Ridiculously easy and inexpensive course hosting will never fly.” He writes “This approach is fatally flawed in a number of respects and it will never catch on. For one thing, it is far too cheap, and can never justify escalating technology infrastructure budgets. Worse, instructors and students could adopt this technology with minimal assistance or oversight from instructional technology specialists. In this profoundly unserious framework, there is nothing to prevent students from previewing courses before they take them, or reviewing courses later on. Indeed, some “learner” might benefit from this content without being an enrolled student at all!.”

All very good reasons to continue with this approach to course development.

What Japan Thinks has just published the results of the goo survey on Opencourseware in Japan. The survey was conducted in December 2007 and covered 1,000 members of the goo Research monitor group and focused on materials available from universities within the Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium (the UNU plans to join JOCW in March 2008).

The respondents indicated that the main benefits of universities sharing their lectures where that universities would become more open (58%), it would be possible to compare courses (44%) and that this would raise interest in universities within society (43.5%).

Nearly 93% of those surveyed considered Opencourseware to be an extremely good or good thing, and a similar percentage indicated a desire to use the materials for either personal interest/education or as part of obtaining a qualification.

Educational materials that the respondents wanted to see most online where lecture notes/reference materials (70%) and lecture video recordings (57%). The fields of study that were of most interest were economics, information technology and business studies/marketing.

The main concerns regarding Opencourseware was that the lectures should be easy to understand (29%), should include a rich selection of courses (20%) and interesting lecture themes (19%).

The first presentation was by David Wiley and is entitled E-Learning and Openness. Next, Hide Tokuda gave a talk on elearning in Keio University and this was followed by a presentation from Peter Haddawy on E-learning for Enriching the Learning Experience.

The presentation from Derek Keats focused on E-Learning in an Education 3.0 world and this was followed by a presentation by Brendan Barrett on the UNU Media Studio’s philosophy of Build Share Collaborate (beware – big file!)

The meeting was really interesting and we had a very useful exchange of views. We are planning to put ten courses online by the end of 2007. In this picture, you can see Philip Schmidt giving some background on the work that they are doing at UNU-MERIT and also on his experience with the University of Western Cape’s Free Courseware project. There is a project blog on the work at UWC that you may want to take a look at.
Here at the UNU, we have funding for the pilot phase of the OCW project which brings together our institutes in Macau, the Netherlands and Canada. Other institutes will join in phase 2 as we expand to cover the entire UNU network from 2008 onwards.