I was listening to the BBC's Digital Planet podcast this morning and they had an interesting segment about how a university in Brazil was making use of the resources from the OpenLearn project at the Open University in England. The project is similar to the Open CourseWare effort at MIT and elsewhere. In both cases, university courses are made available online and many include audio and video segments as well as the syllabus, assignments and so on. The big challenge is how to make use of these excellent materials. A persistent student might make their way through a cours
e as a self-study, but I think they are more suited for modification by instructors who are teaching something similar. Maybe only a particular unit would fit into someone's course, but since these materials are offered under a Creative Commons license, they can be modified and re-used as you like.
The big step (in my mind) with the OpenLearn materials is that many of them are available as Moodle courses. Just download the complete course, upload it to your Moodle installa
tion, click Restore and now the course is ready to be modified
or offered as-is. I was able to add a couple of courses to Moodle pretty easily this way and I think there are some very good ones among the hundreds available on the Open University OpenLearn website.
Comments
Laura
So far we are just exploring what courses might be helpful to us and trying to locate an instructor willing to work with the material. There are so many courses that look good, but it will come down to having someone with an interest in using it.
The real advantage with the OpenLearn materials vs. those from MIT and others in the Open CourseWare project is that there is much less work involved in getting them into a format we can use. I'm sure there is quite a bit of effort involved in making the courses available in multiple formats, but to me that is a big difference in our situation where we don't have personnel to convert the materials into Moodle courses.