OpenCourseWare (OCW) project is one of the best known cases of Open Content in the world of education. Basically, it consists of the publication of learning course proposals including the educational materials and related resources the students need to achieve their goals.

OpenCoruseWare serves as a showcase for the use of educational materials and it can be very useful to help teachers and others find what they are really looking for because they can look at formal structured examples of usage of all of those resources. After finding the resources, the OCW users can pick either the ideas about course organization or reuse the digital resources, adapting them to their own needs.

OpenCourseWare does not aim to be a learning platform. For example, it lacks essential features of this kind of application. Usually, OCW projects provide some ways of facilitating communication between students and teachers and, for example, the assessment proposal is merely a bare exposition of the evaluation process (even if it includes documents with former real assessments) and not a real way of evaluating the OCW user.

But, actually, students do learn using OCW. Probably in the same way a student can learn using a library. This fact leads us directly to analyze the potential value of OCW as an educational tool. A lot of people speak about the “educational value of the OpenCourseWare” by remarking on the “OPEN NATURE” of a traditionally closed good-structured-information for learning. But, as David Wiley has emphatically stated, the open characteristic does not add any educational value to anything.

In order to get the maximum educational value of a learning resource, it has to be modified, localized and adapted to a concrete situation. This process will transform the learning potential into learning action. But how can we use the OCW resources and structure in order to create a real learning situation? The “OCW IN MOTION” project proposes a way of “putting in the mixer” one, two or more similar OpenCourseWare proposals from two or more different teachers.

This tool is a Wiki (actually a dokuwiki) adapted to:

• show in a parallel view two or more OCW using the RSS capabilities of the OCW provider.
• stimulate the relationship between the different OCW proposals.
• control the contributions of the students following a course.
• allow and control the external contributions.

For each OCW set of pages there will be a structure which allows the user to:

• use a wiki-style structure to show the OCW content, allowing specific content from another contributor to add and complete the OCW information without worrying about the IP problems.
• extend the teacher’s OCW with a Student’s OCW related with it.
  • personal hand notes they wrote at classroom
  • dissertations
  • homework
  • reports of activity
  • etc.
• extend the whole content with external contributions.

• The static content of a traditional OCW will act as a catalyst of the more dynamic structures like the student’s OCW.
• The main wiki container will hold the different OCW trying to establish relationships between them, like the reusage of materials.
• It converts the educational potential of the OCW into a work-flow of educational activity.
• It improves the OCW content by adding the opinions and experiences of students and teachers.
• It uses syndication features of the OCW platforms to avoid redundancy of work.
• It is compatible with LMS-driven learning process.

Open Content Interoperatibility Meeting (Dec'07 Palo Alto, Ca. USA)

ocwinmotion_presentation_interoperability_meeting.ppt

OCW Spanish Chapter meeting. May'08 Alicante, Spain

ocwinmotion_presentation_ocwc_alicante_meeting.ppsx

Open Content Meeting, Sep'07 Logan, Utah.

ocwinmotion_presentation.pdf