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Short Oryoki Presentation

2008-05-23T00:18:00Z

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Oryoki Screenshots

2008-05-20T01:44:00Z

Just added a small set of Oryoki screenshots to Flickr.

Oryoki Screenshots

O'Reilly Foo Camp 2008

2008-05-07T13:10:00Z

Just got the official confirmation for Foo Camp 2008 last night. I’ll be heading to Sebastopol in July to hang out with some very cool people doing some cool things in the areas of technology, science, the web and who knows what else. I am honored to be considered for this and can’t wait to get some feedback on Oryoki and meet the people that I have looked up to for so long.

A Brief History of Open Educational Resources

2008-05-06T18:21:00Z

Open courseware and Open Educational Resources started as an idea and a vision and, over the course of a decade, have morphed in to a Worldwide effort to bring free, high-quality educational materials to the masses.

The OER Timeline

1998
This whole story begins with a guy named David Wiley who first coined the term “open content” and also developed one of the first open licenses for non software, forging the path for the Creative Commons movement. David is also the director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning which, among other things, is the group that develops and maintains the eduCommons publishing platform.

2000
MIT proposes OCW to help them in the pursuit of their mission of advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship around the world. MIT plans to make all of their courses available for free online.

2001
Creative Commons is founded in Massachusetts with the goal of providing a sliding scale of licenses that range from full copyright protection to works in the public domain. Creative Commons licenses also allowed content authors to retain original copyright of their work while still allowing it to be used in a manner that they decide.

2002
UNESCO sponsors the Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries which used the term Open Educational Resources to describe their efforts to a create a universal educational resource for all of humanity. Pretty lofty goals, if you ask me.

2003
MIT Open Courseware is officially launched with 500 courses and three language translations.

2005
With open courseware gaining steam, MIT and other educational institutions formed the Open Courseware Consortium. The OCW’s main goals were to promote the use and expansion of open courseware and other open educational resources around the World and to develop sustainable models for publishing such materials.

2006 and Beyond
The open courseware movement continues to grow and pick up steam with universities around the World adopting this open standard for education. Here is a list of active OCW projects in the United States:

PBS to Release Nova Interviews Under Creative Commons

2008-04-23T21:21:00Z

Great Article over at Wired about how PBS is planning on releasing hundreds of Nova interviews as Creative Commons-licensed content. This is great for news for open courseware content creators who want to include this material in their courses. Essentially, the license allows the creator (PBS) to retain full copyright privileges on the content, but allow the public to freely share, distribute, copy and transmit the work.

FlowingData

2008-04-23T18:53:00Z

FlowingData is a great blog on data visualization written by Nathan Yau, a UCLA PhD candidate in Statistics. He writes on some interesting topics including 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox and my personal favorite, Area Codes in Which Ludacris Claims to Have Hoes. Not to mention, his site is clean, simple and easy to use. Huzzah, FlowingData!

Oryoki Project Defense

2008-04-23T03:49:00Z

Well, it’s official. I will be defending my Master’s project on May 9th. This marks the end of a 6-year college career and the beginning of a project that will hopefully help others get on board with the open courseware movement.

If you’re in the greater Lansing area on May 9th, stop by:
134 Comm Arts Building, Studio D at 10:00am.

Oryoki Blog Now Using Passenger

2008-04-17T16:30:00Z

This morning I moved The Oryoki Blog (which is powered by Mephisto) off of Mongrel and on to Passenger (mod_rails)—the new Rails Apache module by the guys over at Phusion. Passenger makes deploying Rails applications as easy as dropping files into a web directory and removes the burden of configuring FastCGI and Mongrel with Apache. What this ultimately means is that Rails applications (like Oryoki) now become much easier to deploy and in tern will now be accessible to a larger audience. And that’s really the ultimate goal, making Oryoki (and free educational material) available to as many people as possible. Sweet.

Your Content's on the House

2008-04-17T01:23:00Z

I just added the Creative Commons 3.0 licensing to the site and the RSS feed (thanks, FeedBurner). All the content here is now officially free (as in beer)—so enjoy, learn and help support Creative Commons.

Oryoki: An Introduction

2008-04-16T03:17:00Z

Oryoki is a simple, open courseware publication system that makes it easy for organizations and individuals to share educational materials online. Oryoki is easy to deploy and maintain, allowing users to concentrate on publishing material not maintaining software. The project is currently in the early stages of development and will be part of my master’s degree thesis before it officially goes public. In addition to the application, I will also be publishing the design research that accompanied the project.

Planned Features

This section is really more of a wish list then an official feature list, but all of these elements are important and need to be incorporated in some form or another:

1. Simple, Clean User Interface
This is key—the interface can’t get in the way of the user. Oryoki’s interface will be transparent and informative, emphasizing the publication and organization of course material.

2. Liquid Templates
Liquid is a Ruby library used for safe template rendering. It’s a great system (I’m using it right now) and it works seamlessly with Ruby on Rails, the framework of choice for Oryoki.

3. Microformats Support
I really want Oryoki to be an upstanding web citizen, and that means that it needs to speak multiple languages. Semantics are important and the Microformats standard is a great way to introduce a semantic layer into your web applications. Support for hCard, rel-tag and XOXO are planned.

4. Oryoki API
Oryoki will give users the ability to share their data at an application level with other programs. An integrated API will allow developers to query course information within an Oryoki application for use in their own projects.

5. Syndication
This is almost a given. All popular content syndication formats will be supported.

6. Document Library
All of the course content in Oryoki will be stored in the Library. Oryoki’s Library will handle the cataloguing, tagging and management of uploaded content like pdfs and images. Library content is available to all of the courses and can be shared across the system. Oryoki also tracks downloads of Library content and can report on usage and frequency trends.

7. Open
Oryoki will (upon completion) be released as open source software. The goal of this project was to promote the open courseware movement, which intern means supporting open source software. Oryoki will remain free and open.

And lots more…

The State of Open Courseware

2008-04-11T16:00:00Z

Education is expensive. Not only is it expensive, but costs at some U.S. universities are skyrocketing at ten to twenty times the current rate of inflation. To give you an example, I’ve been attending Michigan State University since August of 2002 (four years as an undergraduate and two as a grad student). In that six years, tuition for in-state undergraduates has jumped from $179.75 to $277.50 per credit hour. That’s an increase of over 60% in 6 years—obviously our current system is not sustainable.

Now, there’s no single solution that will fix the sorry state of education in the United States, but looking to open courseware (OCW) as a model might be one place to start. For those that aren’t familiar with OCW, think of the open source software model applied to educational material. Basically, universities and other educational institutions agree to publish a selection of their course content on the Internet, free of any restrictive licensing and openly available to the public. The published courses are not intended to be part of a degree-granting program, but rather a way for universities to contribute to a network of free, high-quality educational materials.

The Open Source Model

To give you an example of how OCW could change the face of education in the U.S. you only have to look as far as the open source software community. Open source software is driven by collaborators from all over the World, free to the public and in most cases better written and more secure then its commercial counterparts. Open source has proven that there does not need to be lucrative financial incentives to get developers to contribute code to projects. There is an aspect of social responsibility and a “give back” mentality that drives most people to contribute their time to projects. So why can’t we think that OCW could have the same effect on education that open source has had on software development? We have the resources, some of the brightest researchers and academics in the World call the U.S. home. What we don’t have is a national agenda focused on educating the population. That’s clear given that we spend about four cents of every tax dollar on education and about 50 cents of every dollar on national defense.

Open courseware is not the cure-all. It will not fix our current education crisis, nor will it make us all Rhodes Scholars. What it will do though is make people aware that education shouldn’t be a privilege for just those who can afford it—it should be something that is universally accessible to everyone, regardless of their nationality, economic status or place in this World. We have to start somewhere, and the more knowledge we can make freely accessible means more knowledge that would otherwise be out of reach to most people.

Learn more about the open courseware movement: