Abstract
Students and Learners: The Issue of OCW and University Credit
Larry Cooperman, OCWC, US
Moderator: Larry Cooperman has worked in continuing education for 15 years and will discuss the opportunity for continuing education wings of the university to award continuing education units (CEUs) through technology-assisted assessment.
Panelists:
Bekka Kahn has worked with the Peer 2 Peer University since its founding in 2009. A South African based mostly in London, she is currently a PhD student at King's College, London. Preetha Ram is president and co-founder of OpenStudy.com. She will discuss her organization's transitional plans. Prof. Eko Indrajit is President of the Indonesian Association of Higher Education Institutions in Computing Studies (APTIKOM). He will discuss the OCW usage issue many of the Consortium's members face and how degree-bearing credit provided a bridge from an OCW project with lofty goals to an institutionalized part of a degree path. Steve Carson is External Relations Director for MIT OpenCourseWare. He will explain the MITx initiative. Conference Theme: Impact
Summary: The panel will present the thorny issues and promising projects that attempt to connect students and learners alike to OCW.
Abstract: It seems like every day a new announcement is made of a major project involving the production of significant quantity of open content – textbooks, OERs, OCWs, even complete open curricula. Yet how close are we to the vision of making higher education universally accessible in a meaningful way? One of the missing links in the chain seems to be the opportunity to convert serious study from OCWs into a verifiable and meaningful educational background for an individual learner or matriculated student.
This panel will present a variety of perspectives and projects related to this conversion issue, ranging from the growing field of open study groups (Peer2Peer University, OpenStudy.com), government/university collaboration (Aptikom/Indonesia), continuing education (UC Irvine Extension) and non-credit participation certification (FGV Online).
Collectively, this panel will examine specific questions:
1. What are the implications for higher education of the growth of concurrent and alternative OCW-based educational paths? How do opportunities for combining open study with degree and certification paths change the higher education landscape?
2. Individual study, while requiring changes in the instructional design of resources, does not pose particular platform issues. Group study has its shares of platform design challenges, whether it is in integrated with university study, parallel to university study, or completely independent from university study.
3. What are the potential mechanisms for assessment of independent study of OCW? Are these assessments valid? If valid, what are the barriers to widespread acceptance?
