[photo source]

1. MIT OpenCourseWare – For someone looking to expand their knowledge of a subject without receiving a degree, there’s almost no better place than MIT OCW (and we’re not just saying that because their study groups are with us). MIT OCW’s greatest strength is the breadth of its offerings–the program’s been running for nearly 10 years, and it’s acquired a huge amount of courses. There are over 2,000 courses, which is pretty amazing. Though much of the course material is available for OCW users on YouTube and Flickr (and other similarly easy-to-use sites), the inconsistent availability of extra course materials, like assignments, answers, or course notes can be tough to navigate–how much is available varies from course to course. However, the ease of use, the wide course availability, and intuitive interface of the OCW site makes MIT OCW easily the best OCW offering out there.

2. NYU Open Education - NYU’s strong integration with iTunes U and YouTube, particularly for standalone material, is impressive. Unlike MIT OCW, which is focused on people who want to complete an entire course’s worth of material, NYU’s program, with its podcasts and videos, is useful for people looking to learn something new in a short burst of free time (much like the TED talks). Currently, there are only two actual courses available in the program (a social history of New York and an American Literature course). However, the ease of content distribution for those two courses (users just pick what lecture they want to listen to from a drop-down list, and a reading list is provided) means that this program has great potential going forward.

3. Johns Hopkins OpenCourseWare - This program is interesting because it’s very focused–the courses offered focus on all aspects of public health. The courses are organized by topic (adolescent health, geriatric medicine, etc.), and the individual course sites are intuitive to use and provide course syllabuses and links to articles relevant to individual lectures. However, the course materials offered from the school are mostly lecture notes, rather than the lectures themselves in video format. This is the biggest weakness of the program; otherwise, it is potentially a useful resource for someone looking to build an in-person health curriculum at the k-12 or university level, and is a good source of review or additional learning for those already in the field. The readings lists are particularly useful for those trying to teach themselves.

4. Notre Dame OpenCourseWare – Notre Dame’s OCW project seems to have the second-highest number of courses after MIT, and on a similarly wide range of subjects. The course catalog closely mirrors a traditional one–if a course is cross-listed, that fact is noted and students are directed to the site on which the cross-listed materials are provided. What is particularly nice about this program is that lists of assignments (and assessment rubrics, when appropriate) are provided; if a student wants to design a blog as part of a computer technology class, the OCW website provides enough information to point them where they need to go. However, the lecture is not provided in video format–instead, a transcript of the course or a very complete lecture note outline is provided. These materials are more than enough to go on for a beginning student; however, students miss out on the discussion interaction between students and the professor that’s possible to observe in filmed lectures. The courses are downloadable as .zip files, which is particularly nice.

5. Weber State University OpenCourseWare - In addition to being a nice representation of how even lesser-known institutions can have OCW programs, WSU’s OCW program is well-thought-out in that several of the courses available through it were for-credit distance learning courses to begin with. That means that some of the disconnect that can come from the translation from in-person to distance programs has already been dealt with. Though there’s not a huge selection of courses, the areas in which they are offered (including Criminal Justice) are interesting, and full-text transcripts of lectures are provided along with a reading list. This program is probably best-suited for working professionals trying to pick up a new skill for work or for their own interest without entering into a for-credit program.

As we’ve said, this is by no means a comprehensive list of open course programs. However, it covers a wide variety of American programs–all with unique course offerings and ways of delivering content. Especially for people in places where higher education is not readily available, open courses can be a way to use the internet to access education they’d otherwise never have access to.

Do you have a program you think we missed? Let us know in the comments!

[Only At Tech]

A great example student-controlled social media presence is familiar to most OpenStudy users: Georgia Tech. Among high school and university students in Georgia, the most popular Tech website around is the student-designed, student-run Only At Tech–complete with a version mocking the University of Georgia for the UGA/Tech game. Popular entries on the site focus on typical Tech student gripes: few female students, heavy workloads, and excessive consumption of alcohol. Now, the amount of truth in these gripes is up for debate–however, it’s almost certainly not the image Georgia Tech wants to convey to applicants (especially women, those worried about the workload, and non-drinkers). By not getting out ahead of the game and aggressively promoting a university-managed view of student social activity outside of the traditional school website, Georgia Tech has to work that much harder to combat a negative image.

This isn’t to say that a completely university-produced site would have been better. University-produced media is, by and large, ignored by prospective students. This is in part because students assume (often correctly) that admissions departments are, at the very least, completely glossing over what life is really like at their school. Prospective students aren’t dumb; they know that not everything about a university is Frisbee on the quad with a diverse, attractive group of friends–they want to know what finals week is like. Applicants are interested in what real students have to say–it’s up to the school to curate which students applicants hear from. Applicants are still going to be starting at a school’s official website–if a school aggregates public social media feeds from its students and faculty on its own website, it can combine some level of control with authenticity.

[NC State on Twitter]

North Carolina State University has done a particularly good job of this kind of semi-controlled aggregation–their NCSU Twitter page has received a great deal of good press. The site, run on an open source platform developed by NCSU employees, aggregates a selected set of Twitter accounts related to the university. Some of these belong to university employees, some of these are official Twitter feeds for sports teams and libraries, and some are for student clubs. By hosting the site itself, the university is able to control who gets shown (it’s telling that most of the accounts are university-run or are affiliated with adult alumni rather than students) and what the site looks like–it’s decked out in school colors. But, by using Twitter accounts rather than a static web site, the university is able to look web-savvy and maintain an air of authenticity. Even better, the school has to put in a minimal amount of effort to maintain the site because other people are producing the content.

[Oxford College Fan Page]

For schools which don’t want to venture into the world of Twitter, there are low-effort ways to increase social media presence in a way that won’t have students rolling their eyes. Especially during application season, having an official Facebook fan page can be hugely helpful for prospective students. Most students already use the site (not always true of Twitter) and a fan page requires no real technological expertise from admissions staff. Another Georgia school, Oxford College of Emory University, does a particularly good job with its Facebook page. During the year the site is regularly updated with profiles of student leaders, links to student-made videos, and information about school events. During the summer, it links to the school’s official Facebook groups for each incoming class–and this is where the site becomes particularly useful. If a school can convince its incoming freshmen to join an official Facebook group (rather than a student-controlled one), it can make sure that the group is run by in-the-know current students and faculty rather than just pre-freshmen. This way, the school can keep an eye on the discussion and  make sure students are getting timely, accurate answers. All a successful Facebook page requires is paying a work study student to keep it updated; all that is needed for a successful Facebook class group is for the school to create a group early on, before students do, and encourage current students to answer incoming students’ questions.

Social media can be a strange new world for university staff not used to a generation of students for whom going without Facebook for a week is a huge struggle. However, if a university doesn’t stay on top of its image, its students will step in to fill that void–and they may not convey the message a university wants affiliated with its name. By taking advantage of pre-existing Twitter accounts and a Facebook-savvy student body, schools can easily increase their social media presence with minimal effort.

[image source]

College libraries may have an answer. To increase usage by computer-dependent students, many university libraries have started using Meebo clients and other IM services on their websites to provide a host of real-time services–book renewal, research help, or answers to questions about school events. Some forward-thinking libraries even use services like Text a Librarian so that students can, well, text a librarian for help. Since so much of the information that librarians deal with is now digitized–online journals and the like–students increasingly don’t need the library to find resources, but do need the research expertise of the librarian; instant message systems allow for that real-time help without tying students to a brick-and-mortar building.

These services could just as easily be applied to study sessions. If a school picks a TA to help with the class, he or she can man a chat client for a certain number of hours each week. If a school’s committed to 24-hour accessibility, they can even hire several TA’s in different time zones; if not, students can vote on when they most want study help and those can be the TA’s business hours (no need for it to be 9-5). Schools could even use Meebo rooms for unmonitored group chat; the chat rooms can be embedded on web pages, so it would be easy to stick the chat room on whatever page students are used to going to for their online class. When the TA is off duty, students can still pop into the group room and see if their classmates were around to help. Web-embedded chat allows for real-time learning without the requirement of close monitoring from professors.

[photo source]

One-on-one texting services are probably not the way to go for study group questions; however, group texting clients like GroupMe have huge potential to be really useful for text-based study groups. The free service (US-only for the time being) allows for group texting and conference calls of up-to 25 people. No smart phones are required. Once a person is added to a group, they’re sent a text from the group number. Any time a member of the group texts that number, everyone in the group receives a text; if someone calls that number every phone rings into a conference call. If a person doesn’t want to receive group messages, they can either mute the group or remove themselves from it entirely. For short questions and answers, GroupMe is a great way for professors to encourage student-managed, real-time learning, and students will appreciate the ease-of-use and easy access to their peers–because of the single number, there’s no need for students to find out each other’s contact information once the professor or TA sets up the GroupMe group.

Real-time Q&A sessions can be difficult for online learning, but they’re certainly not impossible. Web-savvy professors can lower their work load and increase student performance by taking advantage of the tools available to improve the online studying experience–an excellent situation for everyone involved.

The worry with online study groups is that, if completely open, there’s no way to check answers for quality or to keep a discussion on track–this is the problem with Yahoo Answers (which has inspired a Tumblog of best/worst questions because of this). Clearly targeted study groups and classes for online students should have a group size smaller than, roughly, the entire internet.

[photo source]

So, should students then be grouped the way that they would be in real-life class sessions? That’s the strategy behind Blackboard‘s discussion forums–students enrolled in a single class have access to the group’s discussion board; people outside the group don’t have access and there’s no differentiation between people in the class. But this has a few issues of its own–though it’s easy to cut out chatter from outside of the classroom, it may be difficult to have a useful study session if the entire class is trying to post comments on a few posts (especially if the class hasn’t been subdivided).

In addition, there’s no way for students to identify themselves as being at a certain level of comfort with the material–students who are really struggling can get lost in a free-for-all forum, and students who don’t feel like they need the help may be tempted to ignore the forum, which means that the class loses their help. Clearly there needs to be a way to both break students down into small-enough groups that no one’s contributions are lost, and make students feel like their needs are being met by the discussion.

[photo source]

Because online learning is not constrained by the difficulties of face-to-face learning (there’s no need to reserve a room, and discussions can be asynchronous), the next big distance learning product will be one that is able to serve as a hub for professors and students to organize student study groups which are smaller units of larger classes–maybe 15-20 students. These groups can be student-managed–but the professor will be able to see which posts in each group are most actively discussed (indicating that students might be struggling or that a topic needs to be reviewed in class).

Students could use the service to manage their own message-board discussions, but perhaps these could be in the form of blogs (with each individual question standing alone as a post, rather than a less user-friendly forum tree). Students could  make their own avatars, because study groups at any size benefit from easy-to-recognize identifiers for group members. The service would even serve as a hub to organize group chats, video conferences, or private messaging between group members. Professors could highlight the best discussions each week in class to share things that of broad interest to all of the class’s students.

A system like this would allow students to feel like their voices were being heard and would allow professors to passively manage a very large class’s study groups. There is no tool yet which organizes these online study groups as well as is needed–in part because people are used to traditional education, where these groups arise organically from face-to-face class time interaction. If online learning is able to harness this small-scale hybrid between a TA section and a study group, it will have embraced something truly innovative, rather than just an online copy of traditional learning.

[photo source]

Open education as a concept has its roots in open source software and copyleft licensing–they’re united by the idea that creators of content can choose to share their content for free. The end result is better content, because an entire group of interested people all over the world can work on a project rather than just a lone person typing away in an office somewhere.

In open education, things like lectures and course materials are shared for free online. Supporters of the idea believe that professors and universities don’t lose anything by making their information freely available (since most students looking at information online weren’t going to enroll at the institution anyway), and they may gain something valuable–a 16-year-old who teaches herself how to program through online computer science lectures may create the next Facebook/Twitter/Groupon superchild, for instance.

Open education is clearly appealing to people who are locked out of formal education because of cost–and, with college costs rising faster than the median income, this is an increasing portion of the population. But many universities are reluctant to embrace open education because they are holding on to the old university mentality–education is a valuable commodity, and should be shared, but only for students enrolled at the university. If students can access lectures online, what motivation do they have to actually pay tuition? It turns out, there’s a lot–students don’t go to college to learn so much as they go to receive a degree or interact with professors one-on-one. Keeping information locked up doesn’t help colleges retain paying students, but it does prevent people who want to learn from trained professors from doing so.

As a college student myself, I’ve had more than one professor bemoan the fact that any information is available online, and there’s no way to tell whether or not it’s true. The smartest of those professors realize the power that open education gives them: if their lectures are hosted on a university’s domain, and they have a doctorate, students can be sure that the information in the lecture is probably correct–and if a professor is the first to get their lecture on Voltaire/Apache/third gender societies online, they can be the one controlling the tone of the debate for people interested in those topics. Professors (and universities) who refuse to use the internet as a means of distributing content are increasingly going to become irrelevant to the discussion that is happening online.

[photo source]

There are certainly valid debates to be had about how open education content should be licensed–as this post does a wonderful job of proving, the existing open source licenses (the Creative Commons and GNU Public License) aren’t really equipped to handle university materials, and there are ethical and legal questions surrounding the licensing of student-produced content if it’s placed online. But we at Open Study don’t see this as an argument against open education so much as an argument for a real debate about the course that open education will take in the next 5-10 years. And if the debate plays itself out on Open Study itself, so much the better!

[photo source]

One shift will have to be in how we think about students’ ages and life experiences. This article from the Association for Psychological Science about non-traditional students sums it up nicely–teachers have to remember that an experience that favors one group of students over another is unfair and counter to the goals of higher education. If students are brought together online, they may be of all different ages and even from different countries; this may mean that word problems or examples that work for students in college towns don’t work for their classmates who are in the workplace–or in a different country.

One of the ways professors can help students of any age is to focus on lessons which relate to current issues affecting people of all backgrounds. Almost any field has some sort of application (that is, of course, why students are learning about it), and the best professors are those who can show their students why this learning matters. A side-effect of this is that current events–unlike most textbooks or ancient Greek texts–feature people which students can identify with. A student who knows why an academic concept matters to them is a student who will be dedicated to finding out more–these are the students want in their classrooms, and they have to do their part to make that happen.

The article suggests additional community-based assignments for students. For first-generation students, this can help build relationships to business communities in their future fields that they may not otherwise have. Business students can shadow a professional for a few hours, or math students can help tutor high schoolers–these are not terribly time-intensive, and can help students build contacts and network in ways they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Even for distance learners, this can be done: students could go out into their communities and compare notes and analyze the reasons for similarities or differences that they observed.

The very idea of what class time is for is changing, too–and with good reason. Students used to taking in information online can feel frustrated and constrained by a traditional lecture format. Instead, professors (especially in larger universities where physically fitting students into a lecture hall is impossible) are already starting to present lecture content online in the form of narrated powerpoint presentations or videos of lectures that students can watch at their leisure. In-class time can instead be spent on group projects and student presentations–things which encourage interaction between students and each other, as well as students and professors. Students learn better when they are actively engaged in the process, and for in-person learners that’s one of the most engaging uses of class time–so says this article from Barbara Davis at UC Berkley.

When students are doing their learning mostly online, collaboration is still possible, and it’s an important way for students to benefit from each other the way they would in a traditional real-time classroom. Professors need to be creative in how they adapt their technology for online learners: should each student be assigned to post something on the class blog for others to comment on each week? Should small-groups be assigned to IM with each other and present the transcript for the professor or the class? Should the professor assign students to make their own powerpoint lectures to share with the class? What will work for each class is different, but all of these share a common thread: they’re easily done online, and they encourage interaction between the individuals in a class.

Some things about being a college student (and about college students themselves) may be changing, but one thing hasn’t: the most valuable parts of college are the interactions between students and professors, and the interaction between students and their classmates.

Cityyear’s photostream.

Films like Waiting for Superman have taken swipes at large public schools, encouraging the creation of smaller-scale charter schools to increase student test scores. Though large schools can be and often are subject to a host of problems, a recent New York Times article on Brockton high school in Massachusetts indicates that this doesn’t have to be the case. The high school has 4,100 students and, until recently, most of them were doing poorly on state exams and 1 in 3 dropped out. The school has managed to change its performance dramatically in the last 10 years–this year its students outperformed those at 90% of schools statewide. Administrators attribute the success to incorporating writing in all areas of the curriculum and getting teachers on board with the program–making sure everyone had the same goal.

Sharing a deeply-held common purpose can make even the biggest groups productive learning spaces. The key–and this is the most difficult part, it seems–is getting everyone in a large group to hold to that goal. As critics of Waiting for Superman have noted, cash-strapped public institutions–whether k-12 or university-level–usually don’t have the option to downsize. But, even at large state institutions or online schools, it is possible to create communities motivated to head towards a common goal, and it’s perhaps by focusing on ways to make that happen that education reform can have the greatest success.

Within these larger, goal-driven organizations, however, students benefit from forming smaller groups outside of the control of teachers. This is the motivation behind traditional study groups–the question is the form these will take in classes of hundreds of students who may not live near each other. This article, from Utah State University, explores the benefits of “self-organizing” student communities–groups of students who come together without a teacher to lead them. The authors have observed that the best self-organized online communities come from places with relatively decentralized management: blogs where anyone can post, rather than a mailing list.

One of the benefits of this kind of organization is that it doesn’t require any one person to keep the community vibrant; instead, generation of new content is under the control of all community members and the burden is spread equally. Even more usefully, in spaces where moderation is based on user input (a system in which participants can vote comments up and down, usually), the need for a team of dedicated moderators is diminished. The researchers suggest that those interested in education reform take a gander at the blogosphere–they point out the success of decentralized moderation on Slashdot, an internet phenomenon if ever there was one. Their point is well-made; in educational spaces, where the primary point is mastering new material rather than watching blog comments, this can reduce the workload for community managers so that everyone can instead focus most of their time on learning.

Kennedy Library’s Photostream.

On the whole, people forming educational communities online would do well to look at geeky online spaces–open source software discussion groups, for instance. Discussion groups for open source software provide an excellent example of how a community of learners with mixed levels of proficiency can move forward to create something useful. These communities benefit from the above-mentioned common purpose–in this case, software development–and a community expectation that those who understand material will then go on to share their expertise with others who do not. This advances the knowledge of the overall group, without having to set anyone up as a full-time moderator. If someone is able to answer a question, they do.

In a classroom space, this might look like a blog where students could publish their own findings or questions for everyone else in the class. Classmates could respond to the questions they were able to answer–and the most useful answers would be voted up by the original poster and everyone else who looked at the entry. Perhaps a TA or professor could keep an eye on the blog so as to correct any completely off-base assumptions (or questions that stumped everyone), but this system would reduce the need for a dedicated tutor working one-on-one with stuggling students and instead allow the community’s knowledge to benefit multiple students at once. Tutors will likely become something more like community moderators than people who focus on one-on-one tutorial hours. This is surely a more efficient approach for tutorials and studying in classes with hundreds of students. There is typically enough variation in subject aptitude within a single class that students can answer most of each others’ questions. This is, in essence, the principle behind OpenStudy.

Allowing students to control their own communities by contributing and self-moderating gives them a greater sense of ownership and shared purpose, even in large groups. Allowing them to answer each others’ questions when possible reduces strain on teachers and tutors. This collaborative learning style is suited for the web, and going forward we expect more and more schools to adopt models based on it–it’s worked for tech geeks, it’s working for open source developers, and we think it will work for students.