Danyl Strype

Sunday 16 August 2009 7:19:43 pm

Libre Courseware

I am really excited by the potential for existing learning institutions to make their courses available online. Of course there will be some debates with neoliberal managements who see education as a product, rather than a service, and would see this as giving away their product gratis.

I would argue that people don't go to a university to download a certain package of information into their brain. What they are paying for is
- to be inspired and directed by knowledgeable teachers who can provide one-on-one support for their learning
- to take advantage of the learning support services provided by the campus and staff (access to the library, tutoring services etc)
- to be among a community of fellow learners (so there is peer-to-peer learning as well as teacher>student learning)
- to receive a qualification - an endorsement of their level of academic progress, which rests on the general credibility of that institution

If I'm right, then universities are not giving away what people pay for by sharing courses online. What they are doing is allowing prospective students to evaluate the quality of teaching, and course content, and serving the public good by increasing the general availability of education, which potentially increases goodwill and reputation. Most importantly they are making university-level education available to people who have access to the internet, but cannot enter into university for a myriad of reasons, from financial to geographical.

One example of a university delivering its courses in this way is MIT Opencoursware:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

One of the prerequisites for delivering online courses, whether publicly or only to enrolled students, is suitable Learning Management System (LMS) software. There are now a number of libre software packages available, here are a couple:

Moodle
http://moodle.org/

Sakai Project
http://www.sakaiproject.org/portal

Kia ora
Danyl