Crowducate listened to the user feedback and here’s the new update:

• You can now upvote each course. Besides, courses are not sorted by the time they were created anymore but by the numbers of upvotes.
• The author’s name is now shown for each course. Crowducate is not anonymous as e.g. Wikipedia. The vision is that teachers, instructors, coaches etc. can build up a reputation inside Crowducate, which is useful for them outside Crowducate.
• The age categorization was very unpopular, so it’s gone.

To upvote, press the orange button. The number of upvotes and the author’s name are shown in the lower part of the course summary. We hope you like it. Let us know what you think in the comments section, via Twitter or email! More things to come can be seen in the roadmap post.

Image credit: Vote by alcantar214

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Update 20/01/2015: We changed the license to APGL. Have a look at the comments why.  

Many developers in the open source hemisphere just want to contribute code. Reading or understanding licenses is simply annoying. They just don’t care. However, if we don’t pick any license and publish our code on GitHub, this means “nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work”. And for sure, this is NOT what we are intending.

The website choosealicense from GitHub helps a lot to understand the differences of the most used open source licenses. It’s a good starting point but the main question is not answered, yet: “how do people from the open education community perceive the specific licenses?” MIT (or APACHE) are more permissive than GPL License. The former allows you to copy the code and basically do with it whatever you want. For example, you can copy an open source code, add a feature or two, CLOSE your modified source code and start selling your modified product. The latter requires anyone who uses the code make the source code available under the same conditions. In other words, the modified code from others is open source, too.

Of course, in most cases the former scenario might be totally fine. If you see the source code as tools that you use in a much broader context, for example. But for a truly open source project, does that communicate authenticity? Part of Crowducate’s vision is to learn and share with each other. I hope going for the GPL V3 License will foster contribution.

Best,

Amir

Image Credit: Jen Gallardo (Paper Work)

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Best regards,

Amir

The post How Crowducate came into being appeared first on My CMS.

How do these great content sites go hand-in-hand with Crowducate?

1. Putting the content on Crowducate makes the whole learning process interactive and fun. You can quickly add the content and add some quizzes to it.
2. You can remix content from different courses and add YOUR own content to it
3. As teachers and learners get points for correct answers, you can build up your reputation and have more enjoy education more.

Some great OpenCourseWare (OCW) Websites for teaching

Have a look at these great OpenCourseWare (OCW) sites:

• http://www.oeconsortium.org/courses/category/ More than 2500 (!) courses are here available
• http://oli.cmu.edu/learn-with-oli/see-our-free-open-courses/ Not that many courses, but some are already interactive, which makes adding quizzes even less time consuming.
• http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html Great courses from a world renowned university

There’s much much more. Have a look at the list by Mashable for best opencourseware sites or even the 89 best sites for OpenCourseWare from Open Education Database (OEDb)!

Be aware of the license

For free does not mean you can just take and do whatever you want with it. Most of OpenCourseWare (OCW) is licensed under Creative Commons. This can mean different things. For putting Courses on Crowducate it mostly means attribute the content creator (indicate the source somewhere). You should check the license of any course which you make use of for your Crowducate course.

How to use YouTube videos on Crowducate

Crowducate uses the Markdown language for its editor as explained in sections 3.2 and 3.3. of Crowducate’s Intro Course. So, if you found a great video on YouTube and want to integrate it into one of your units, that’s super easy. All you have to do for video embedding is to :

1. Click on share
2. Click on embed
3. Copy the link from YouTube into the Crowducate editor.

Et voilà, you’re done!

Where to store images online for free for your Crowducate courses

Sometimes you want to use images. No problem with the Crowducate editor (have a look at section 3.2 from above). However, images have to be stored online. No problem with Tinypic. It’s very easy to use.

A little exercise

1. Copy the MIT course about breakthrough products and add new sections to it (you need to be logged-in to do that and then click the XXX button).
2. Here’s the video from Prof. Hippel from MIT you could use for section 2.
3. Cut the video in pieces of 4 to 8 minutes. Most Editors can do that. For example QuickTime on a Mac or Windows Movie Maker. Both video editing tools are for free.
4. Upload to YouTube and embed them in the editor as explained above.
5. Add Quizzes as explained in the Intro Course.

This is a good way to earn some open badges on Crowducate.

That’s it! Any questions? Which sources do you use for open education material? Let us know in the comment section.

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Where is Crowducate heading to?

Answer: Where ever you want it to! We received some feedback from different channels, mostly from our feedback forum, Github issues and some via emails, twitter and other forums. So, this is the roadmap (i.e., features) for the near future. I want to pick one specific email from Adam Heidebrink (@adamheid) whom I contacted after reading his article on Hybrid Pedagogy called Learning Beyond Limits: Open Source Collaboration in the Classroom. Adam’s excellent answer via email is very representative to analyze what features should be implemented next in Crowducate. Here’s an excerpt (I asked for his permission): My comments after “//” and in red.

• “Collaborative tools – how or where can users talk about why they copied/forked a particular class? How do you support multiple users who want to work together to set up a course?”
  // Commenting why people send a change request and/or reject it, is definitely crucial. The other feature he mentions is having multiple admins per course. Both are on our to-do list. Right now, there’s a workaround. If you want to comment on your change request write “//” and then your comment. If the course creator accepts your change request, she has to delete the text after “//” manually.
• “Currently, courses are geared towards individual use, which might be isolating or diminish the sense of community.. While this works great for certain types of learning, such as a step-by-step tutorial, it doesn’t allow for interaction between multiple users (and discussion is such a huge part of learning, in my opinion).”
  // Agreed. At the moment, with our scarce resources at hand, we just added discussion forums where people can share and discuss thoughts. Users can open new threads for each course. This is far away from the optimal solution but should work fine in the beginning.
• “Examples of how proficient the platform is at handling multimedia.”
  // As Markdown language is used, the platform can easily be used for embedding videos or images. Check this post how to do it. Other form of multimedia is not supported, yet (e.g. slides). 
• “Ranking system – once the site hits a critical mass of classes (especially forked classes) it will be important to have users upvoting and downvoting particular versions of the course to help organize the content on the site.”
  // One of the most requested features. This is on top of the list. 
• “Quiz functionality – consider a way of displaying the answers of others who have submitted after they have finished, especially once the functionality is increased to have short answers and such.”
  // The whole quiz functionality is very primitive at the moment. It takes some time until other answers will be shown but more answering are coming (e.g. true or false; fill in the blanks etc.)

Adam plans to create a short intro course about how to write academic papers. He generally likes the idea of blurring the lines between teacher and student:

“I have always thought that the open education movement could learn a lot from the open source programming community.I am curious to see how much the request change function gets used in a highly populated class. I think [copying/forking courses] will allow localized versions of courses that make more sense for particular audiences..Continuing my example from above, if another instructor came across the academic writing tutorial course, s/he could easily adapt that material to more closely align with his/her course goals.”

That’s exactly the idea. If the critical mass is reached, copying courses quickly allows producing industry-specific courses, or courses in different languages, as you have immediately a course base (the copied course) to start with. On the other hand, the change request function allows specific courses to get better and better in an incremental and iterative sense as students might give quick suggestions while consuming the course.

I just stumbled upon more great feedback regarding Crowducate. Rochelle Nicole’s (@RochelleNicole7) covers Crowducate on three main posts:

1. http://rochellenicole7.blogspot.de/2014/06/hrd-5507-post-5-crowducate.html
2. http://rochellenicole7.blogspot.de/2014/06/hrd-5507-post-8-more-about-crowducate.html
3. http://rochellenicole7.blogspot.de/2014/06/hrd-5507-post-10-even-more-about.html

Rochelle actually suggested the most wanted feature request according to our feedback forum:   “Give the original creator of a course credit if a course is copied.” Besides voting, this is also on out top list and allows to build up an online reputation (1) and to find out where similar instructors can be found. It’s great to see that most ideas resonate with our vision for Crowducate.

You have more suggestions or ideas for the roadmap? Comment on this post or put in the feedback forum. You know some good coders, designers etc. who might want to help? Send them to our open source Github repository (where the whole source code is hosted).

—

Image Credit: Autumn Walk by Natalyia Kalinina

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• Crowducator Badge: You receive these badges when others answer your created quizzes correctly.
  • Level 1: 1 answer; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 2: 5 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 3: 10 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 4: 25 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 5: 50 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 6: 100 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
• Crowducated Badge: You receive these badges when you answer quizzes from others correctly.
  • Level 1: 1 answer; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 2: 5 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 3: 10 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 4: 25 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 5: 50 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000
  • Level 6: 100 answers; Claim Code: CBF-FA21-000

We are currently working with Credly to deliver you the badge experience. Click on the image or here to check out all the badges at once:

You’ll need a Credly account to claim your badges. Currently, delivering badges only works manually:

• Please make sure you’re registered with similar profile names (i.e. Facebook or g+) or email addresses. This makes the approval of your badge easier.
• Check your point status at Crowducate (upper right, in the nav bar).
• Whenever you think/feel you’ve received enough points for a specific badge enter the badge’s CLAIM CODE on Credly’s homepage. The CLAIM CODE is specific to each Badge. Confirm that you want the specific badge.

We’ll double check and then issue the badge or get back to you.

We are going to implement an automatic process once we have more resources. The great thing about Credly is that you can directly send your badges to your own so-called “backpack” on the Mozilla’s Open Badges site. Yes!!! For those who don’t know why all the fuss about the Open Badges’ ecosystem, check out the great Open Badges website.
Mozilla wants to centralize all your learning experiences via Open Badges. This is great for you as you can build up your reputation or use Open Badges as a modern CV. You can display them on Open Badges Backpack.

Last but not least, there are more badges coming up:

• Change Requestor: This badge is very specific to Crowducate. You receive badges when the instructor accepts your sent change requests.
• Crowdulizer: You receive badges for newly registered users who landed on Crowducate thanks to you sharing via social networks and emails.

If you have suggestions for new badges, improvements, questions etc. feel free to comment on this post or use our feedback forum.

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What is this Crowducate all about?

At Crowducate the crowd educates itself. Hence, open education. You know this concept from Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, Crowducate is not an encyclopedia. The two main differences from Wikipedia are structured and interactive courses. By structured we mean that the content is divided into bite-sized chunks (i.e. lectures), which are grouped into sections. Interactive means that each lecture checks if the learner understood the material – currently via a quiz (more interactive options follow soon).

Besides, courses are related to users. Other users can copy courses, which empowers them to develop the copied courses into different new courses (e.g. specializing topics, language translation, etc.). Some of you know these mechanics from open-source software and notably GitHub, respectively.

What is the Benefit to other Open Education Alternatives?

Many of you have notices the raise of massive open online courses (MOOCs). The question is, are they truly open? Most MOOCs have put offline courses online. They’ve “just” taken the conventional teaching model and scaled it. Have a look at the next figures (yellow indicating teachers and white students, respectively).

However, a genuine open education means something else. It means that teaching, i.e. the content creation, also opens up.

Open Source on all Levels

In contrast to MOOCs, at Crowducate all courses are open source. This means people can copy courses to develop into different branches. Furthermore, the whole software itself is open source, too. You can find the source code at Github. You see, we are not only serious about open education but also open source.

How YOU can contribute

1^st option: You might prefer to start learning something at Crowducate by just clicking on a specific course. Whenever you think, “there’s a grammatical mistake” or “answer x from the multiple-choice question of lecture y is too vague” or whatever it is, you can push the button  to send a change request to the teacher. Cool huh? Through this feedback process the courses become better and better.

2^nd option: You copy an existing course by clicking , use it as your base and develop it the way you want.

3^rd option: (1) Sign-up/Log-in, click (2) TEACH, (3) CREATE COURSE and now you can start creating a course from scratch.

Which features next?

Bear in mind this is the very beginning – a prototype of the product. It’s you who decides how we evolve it together. The roadmap post goes more into detail, so do the hackpad and the Github repo (for developers). Give us some feedback in the feedback forum or in the comment section. You can also write us an email.

You are the crowd. Open education is in your hands. Let’s democratize education together! And let’s enjoy learning and teaching.

Best,

Amir

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