If you’ve ever needed help on how to craft the perfect essay or persuade the most obnoxious classmate, you’ve probably perused Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL). OWL has been around the internets for a good, long time and their fantastic resource helps all levels of learners.

This partnership rounds off the core needs of every student: math and writing. Our math group has always been bumpin’ with over 25k+ questions asked per month. This partnership will help aggregate a growing group of learners trying to perfect their written word.

You can learn more about the partnership here: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/contact/owlmailtutors

The writing study group is already developing a loyal and supportive community. Need help with your next draft? Head over to the Writing study group: http://openstudy.com/groups/writing

We are very excited to push online education forward with Purdue’s Online Writing Lab.

Best,
Owlfred and The OpenStudy Team

1. Give and Get help!

Simple, isn’t it? The more questions you ask, the more answers you give, the more expertise points and levels you get!

Chandman has asked a good question and satellite73 has answered it

2. Rate each other helpful!

If you give a great answer, people can reward you extra Expertise Points by giving medals. Some people might even become your fans — in turn providing you more XP!

Amistre64′s levels and fans…very impressive.

3. Achievements!

There are over 30 achievements you can get by asking questions, answering, giving and getting medals and performing other activities on the site. Each achievement earned will give you XP and help level up that much quicker!

An real user example of achievements earned

By doing stuff, helping people, and developing a reputation, a user begins their journey of scaling levels in a study group on OpenStudy.

An overall OpenStudy level reflects the aggregate XP (levels conquered) in all of the study groups of the user’s expertise.

How do you compare amongst your peers?

Don’t worry, we’ll be able to let you know where you stand very soon.  In the mean time, get as many XP as possible, level up, and rake up fans!

Study Well!

The OpenStudy Team

if I had five minutes alone with him. I’d focuse on two key issues in education that had been largely missing from the discussions: Access and Engagement.

You can see the full synopsis over on the Communications of the ACM website.

MIT OCW

Cambridge, MA, Feb 22, 2011 –  As the tenth anniversary of the announcement of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) approaches, MIT has set an ambitious agenda for the program’s next decade: reaching one billion minds.  In the past ten years, MIT’s course materials have been accessed by millions of individuals around the world through its groundbreaking OpenCourseWare program (http://ocw.mit.edu).  By any measure, MIT OpenCourseWare’s impact has exceeded the expectations of the faculty who first proposed the effort, tapping into a vast reservoir of unmet educational need worldwide and revealing the promise of even greater impact to come.  As MIT looks to OpenCourseWare’s next decade, the program seeks to deliver on that promise.  Read more about OCW’s anniversary and future plans at: http://ocw.mit.edu/about/next-decade/

On April 4, 2001, MIT announced Institute would share the core academic materials—including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams—from all of its courses freely and openly on the web, providing resources that educators and learners could use to improve a wide variety of formal and informal educational experiences.  In the ten years since, more than 80% of MIT’s faculty members have voluntarily shared their teaching materials through OCW, amassing a collection of over 50,000 individual resources including documents, video, audio, simulations, animations and sample programming code drawn from over 2,000 courses. An estimated 100 million individuals have accessed these resources, and hundreds of universities around the world  have joined MIT in sharing their own course materials freely and openly on the web.

“It’s quite humbling for us to see the impact OpenCourseWare has had,” says Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, who chairs the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee and was on the original faculty panel that first proposed the program. “We set out to create a resource other faculty could draw on to improve their classes, and tapped into a much larger need around the world.  Millions of people have come to the site for the chance to learn, even without credit offered or access to faculty.”

In the coming decade, MIT OpenCourseWare will continue to publish MIT’s core academic materials—making the OCW site deeper and richer—and will also undertake a series of initiatives designed to magnify the impact of the program through a focus on four key areas of innovation:  First, OCW will continue to collaborate to make OCW’s materials widely available on the web through affiliate sites and mobile channels; second, OCW will undertake projects to make the materials more useful to key audiences; third, OCW will seek to create communities of open learning around MIT’s content; and finally, the OCW team will focus on making the content more adoptable and adaptable for educators everywhere, helping them to share OCW content with their students.

“Our ambition is to increase the impact of OCW by an order of magnitude,” says Professor Dick Yue, who chaired the committee that proposed OCW and also advises the program.  ”If we’ve reached 100 million people in our first ten years, we want to reach a billion in the next ten.  If a million educators used our content in their classrooms so far, we hope to help 10 million use the content in our next decade.”

MIT OpenCourseWare has already begun launching a series of projects developed out of the innovation framework, collectively called OCW’s Next Decade Initiatives. Last September, OCW launched a series of study groups associated with OCW courses in collaboration with OpenStudy (http://openstudy.com).  In four months, these groups have attracted more than 12,000 participants. In January of this year, OCW launched the first of a new series of courses, dubbed OCW Scholar courses (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/ocw-scholar/), designed to meet the needs of independent learners by providing more complete content and logical sequences to facilitate learning.  OCW also recently announced a new iPhone app, OCW LectureHall, that provides an enhanced experience for viewing OCW lectures on that platform.  These efforts join Highlights for High School (http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/), a site OCW launched in 2007 to help US high school educators and students better use OCW resources.

In May of this year, MIT will cohost the annual meeting of the OpenCourseWare Consortium on the MIT campus, welcoming 300 representatives of leading OCW programs from around the world.

About OpenCourseWare

An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials – often including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, and exams – organized as courses. While OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiatives typically do not provide a degree, credit, or certification, or access to instructors, the materials are made available under open licenses for use and adaptation by educators and learners around the world.

About MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare makes the materials used in the teaching of substantially all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate courses—more than 2,000 in all—available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. OCW receives an average of 1.5 million web site visits per month from more than 215 countries and territories worldwide. To date, more than 100 million individuals have accessed OCW materials.

Open Yale Courses recently went live with 4 of their courses. All four courses can be found below:

• Financial Markets with Professor Robert Shiller
• Fundamentals of Physics with Professor Ramamurti Shankar
• Introduction to Ancient Greek History with Professor Donald Kagan
• Roman Architecture with Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner

The courses bring a greater variety of course options to the growing list of OpenStudy study groups. Roman Architecture and Ancient Greek History are great supplements to another recently added partner: MOMA’s SmartHistory.org.  We’re confident the Yale reputation, along with their top caliber professors, will help unite these communities and create cross learning similar to what we cultivate and observe daily at OpenStudy.

Rounding off the more diverse options of study groups is the popular Financial Markets course taught by Professor Schiller. This course has received wide attention over the years because of its ability to bring real world examples into the classroom — demonstrated by its impressive rolodex of guest lecturers including Carl Icahn, Stephen Schwarzman, and David Swensen.

Over the Christmas holidays, NYU’s Open Education program expanded their course offering to a total of four. These course listings can be found below:

NYU Open Education provides a unique online educational experience in the world of literature and sociology. Besides having one of the most impressive course designs in the open educational field, their New York City: A Social History course, is one of the “must take” courses. Similar to Yale, these courses offer a more well-rounded educational offering. This is unique from OpenStudy’s most popular courses which favor the maths and sciences.

High learning and advanced education have taken momentous strides in the last few weeks and it’s exciting to be part of the progression occurring.

Best,
Owlfred Butler

OpenStudy at Project Open Hand

Happy Holidays!

- The OpenStudy Team

We just launched Hoot Camp to get you jump-started learning essential programming methodologies as well as the popular programming language, Python. By the end of Hoot Camp, you’ll be months ahead of regular students. Here is what you get:

• Classroom Community – Online! You’ll Join 29 other students who are eager to learn computer programming as much as you in a private study group. You’ll make new friends and learn together.
• Instruction On Your Time! An additional 6 hours of video lectures performed by a Teaching Assistant from Georgia Tech will help you understand programming and how to apply it to the real world.
• Instruction From a Top Computer Science Program! A Teaching Assistant from Georgia Tech will hold live office hours everyday that week and answer questions and review additional problems sets.
• Increased Real World Programming Experience! 12 additional custom problem sets and solutions that cover several topics including, but not limited to: Iteration, Data Structures, Functions, and Recursions.

Hoot Camp is a five day program that starts November 29^th and goes to December 3^rd. For only $25, you can claim your spot and receive all the benefits of Hoot Camp.

Ready to get started? Click here to claim your spot! Be quick, there are only 19 spots available!