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The personal blog of Al Stevens. Focus is overrated.

Archive for the ‘open education’ tag

Academic Earth — Lectures from the Best

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Academic Earth says they are “an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.”

They’ve launched a site with a few hundred lectures from top professors at top universities. Top rated lectures include:  The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 Yale / History by David W. Blight, Linear Algebra MIT / Mathematics by Gilbert Strang, Game Theory Yale / Economics by Benjamin Polak, Computational Science and Engineering I MIT / Mathematics by Gilbert Strang and Computer Science II: Programming Abstraction Stanford / Engineering and Julie Zelenski.

I’m watching “The Civil War and Reconstruction Era.” …and I love the “dim the lights” feature on the web page, which tunes out all of the page surround.

I hope they succeed. I’d also be happy to see them just keep adding lectures.

Their site is at: www.academicearth.org

Written by Al Stevens

March 25th, 2009 at 10:40 am

Introduction to Open Education is Open

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IPT 692R: Introduction to Open Education – a course taught at Brigham Young University‘s Department of Instructional Psychology and Technology during the Winter 2009 term by Prof. David Wiley is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. As described by the instructor:

Instructional design faculty are frequently criticized for delivering information about innovative new pedagogical methods to their students in the form of traditional lectures – for talking the talk but failing to walk the walk. Setting positive examples is important for people in every field.

There are two ways to describe the design of this course, and both are equally valid. On the one hand, this course is a mix of direct skills instruction combined with project-based learning and collaborative problem solving. The course employs a progression of increasingly complex problems with supportive information, and requires students to synthesize hundreds of pages of literature, interview data, and their own design intuition to produce meaningful artifacts both individually and as part of highly inter-dependent teams. The idea of teach-reteach (characterized by Gong’s description of the Three Person Problem) is at the heart of the students’ day-to-day learning experiences.

On the other hand, the course is a massively multiplayer role-playing game in which students select a character class, develop specialized expertise, complete a series of individual quests, join a Guild, and work with members of their Guild to accomplish quests requiring a greater breadth of skills than any one student can develop during the course.

Course material: IPT 692R: Introduction to Open Education

Written by Al Stevens

January 18th, 2009 at 7:04 pm