Reading an article and searching for relevant references
Sunday, 10 Feb 2013, 10:16
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by David Appel, Wednesday, 27 Feb 2013, 19:15
(H817 - block 1, activity 4)
The assignment of activity 4 was to select one of the projects mentioned in Seely Brown and Adler (2008), Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0 and use the internet to find more information about it, i.e. if the project is still running, if any more papers have been written about it since the Seely Brown and Adler paper was published and if it has been adopted by users other than those in the original institution where it was developed.
I chose to search for references to MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative and started my research with the MIT OpenCourseWare website where one can find an overview on the history of the project and its current status. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, at that time containing 50 courses, today it offers materials of 2150 courses and has reached 125 million visitors from all over the world, averaging 1 million visits each month. Of the visitors, 9% are Educators, 42% MIT students, and 43% are self learners. More statistics can be found in the monthly snapshot reports published on the site.
Searching the OU Library returned many articles discussing the various aspects of the project. While publications of the early years of the project focus on background, purpose and the event of launching the project as such, more recent publications are reflecting its impact on higher education in general and try to explore further developments. The change of topics in when dealing with MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative and the increasing number of publications in the last three years indicate that it has reached a point where interest is no longer restricted on this specific project but beyond that on it’s more general implications.
References
Seely Brown, J. and Adler, R. (2008) ‘Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0’, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 16–32; also available online at http://net.educause.edu/ ir/ library/ pdf/ ERM0811.pdf (accessed 8 February 2013).
MIT OpenCourseWare (2012) Home Page [Online]. Available at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm (accessed 8 February 2013)
Reading an article and searching for relevant references
(H817 - block 1, activity 4)
The assignment of activity 4 was to select one of the projects mentioned in Seely Brown and Adler (2008), Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0 and use the internet to find more information about it, i.e. if the project is still running, if any more papers have been written about it since the Seely Brown and Adler paper was published and if it has been adopted by users other than those in the original institution where it was developed.
I chose to search for references to MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative and started my research with the MIT OpenCourseWare website where one can find an overview on the history of the project and its current status. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, at that time containing 50 courses, today it offers materials of 2150 courses and has reached 125 million visitors from all over the world, averaging 1 million visits each month. Of the visitors, 9% are Educators, 42% MIT students, and 43% are self learners. More statistics can be found in the monthly snapshot reports published on the site.
Searching the OU Library returned many articles discussing the various aspects of the project. While publications of the early years of the project focus on background, purpose and the event of launching the project as such, more recent publications are reflecting its impact on higher education in general and try to explore further developments. The change of topics in when dealing with MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative and the increasing number of publications in the last three years indicate that it has reached a point where interest is no longer restricted on this specific project but beyond that on it’s more general implications.
References
Seely Brown, J. and Adler, R. (2008) ‘Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0’, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 16–32; also available online at http://net.educause.edu/ ir/ library/ pdf/ ERM0811.pdf (accessed 8 February 2013).
MIT OpenCourseWare (2012) Home Page [Online]. Available at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm (accessed 8 February 2013)