E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

The Open Education Consortium has become a member of edX, providing opportunities for our members to transform their existing OER and OCW into openly licensed MOOCs under the Open Education Consortium’s shingle on edX.

In the newsletter we have added some additional information:

Why Open MOOCs?

• We heard from many members that they would like to try MOOCs, but haven’t had the opportunity, or don’t know where to start.
• This provides us the opportunity to leverage existing OER and bring in the benefits of interaction and data collection offered by the edX platform.
• We can build a diverse array of Open MOOCs that combine open content and open enrollment
• The OEC OpenMOOC Committee recognized the benefit of having the exposure and audience of edX, which uses an open-source platform. 

Key points for participation

• Participating institutions and organizations must be OEC members.
• Any MOOC developed must be developed from existing open content (available under Creative Commons licenses). This is not an opportunity to develop a MOOC from scratch. However, members can add to the open content to make it more MOOC-friendly, such as adding video, assessments, additional resources, etc.
• MOOCs will appear on the edX site under our “shingle” (OECx). They will be listed as being offered by the authoring institution, and all credit for content goes to the authoring institution. 
• All content must be openly licensed and marked with the applicable license. The content must also appear in a repository where it can be accessed – in other words, content will not be downloadable from the edX site, but rather it will be viewed on edX and available as open content from the authoring institutions through links posted on edX.
• There is no cost to members to participate, though members have to devote resources to developing and facilitating the courses. 
•  We are doing a pilot with 6 universities to offer courses this coming fall (Sept – Nov). The pilot courses will be in business or environmental/health disciplines.  The pilot will allow us to develop best practice guides and a better understanding of what it takes to create MOOCs from existing open content. Universities for the pilot phase have already been identified.
• Following the pilot, there will be opportunities for more members to participate with courses in any discipline.

I think this is a great opportunity for all Consortium members.Not a member yet? Join today via our website.
This also strengthen the position of EdX in the truly open education world. I will be the board liason to the OpenMOOC Committee.