UCI OpenCourseWare Project

Last week in Bali, Indonesia, Larry Cooperman, the director of UCI’s OpenCourseWare  program, was elected as President of the board of the OCW Consortium. Larry is currently serving his second term as a board member of the OCW Consortium. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is comprised of higher education institutions and associated organizations dedicated to expanding access to education.

Larry’s role in the OpenCourseWare movement has grown with the expansion of the UCI’s OpenCourseWare program, which has steadily added new content in recent years. In March, UCI unveiled the OpenChem project, which is a set of video lectures covering the undergraduate curriculum at UC Irvine.

Larry Cooperman (right) with Dr. Bakary Diallo, Rector of the African Virtual University (pictured left) and Consortium board member Murilo Mendonca (middle), professor of English at Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina (Brazil).

The Department of Chemistry and the School of Physical Sciences, in collaboration with UCI OpenCourseWare, have announced today what they are dubbing as “OpenChem,” a set of video lectures that combine four years’ worth of classes that a chemistry major might take. If you’ve sat in a chemistry lecture hall recently, you may have seen students reviewing the whiteboard or the slides from the previous lecture. Now these lectures are available on the UCIrvineOCW YouTube channel as well as through the OCW website. This week, a special website was set up to ease access to the open chemistry lectures.

Today, Monday, March 11, UCIrvine News featured Professor James Nowick, whose success with open publication of his Chem 51A lectures led to the OpenChem project. UCI’s Teaching, Learning & Technology Center videotaped the lecture, which were subsequently published on YouTube. He tells the story below:

On Monday morning, Larry Cooperman, the Director of the UCI OpenCourseWare program, will appear on HuffPost Live for a video segment on MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. This segment will address the role of MOOCs in democratizing higher education. The segment is schedule to air on Monday at 9:30 AM Pacific (you may want to log on a few minutes earlier). To view the segment, click here.

The UCI OpenCourseWare site will be down for part of this weekend starting at 9:30 PM on Saturday, October 20 until 6:30 AM on Sunday, October 21. If you need access to video lectures, please check out our youtube channel here, which will not be affected by the planned outage.

Last week, Creative Commons and the OpenCourseWare Consortium announced the formation of a task force to help bring open educational resources to women and girls seeking to advance themselves in STEM education. This task force will support the Equal Futures Partnership to expand women’s political participation and economic opportunity. The Equal Futures Partnership was launched last week by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Equal Futures Partnership is committed to having women fully participate in public life and in having women benefit from economic growth. Opening opportunities to better paying jobs in the science and technology fields is where STEM education comes in. Open educational resources are high quality learning materials that are available for free online; these materials will be key for learners and educators to advance the skill and knowledge levels of girls in science, technology, engineering and math.

In a statement released last week, Mary Lou Forward, the Executive Director of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, explained the following, “We are seeking innovative support solutions for girls to succeed in STEM subjects using shared educational resources. Since OER can be accessed freely by anyone, anywhere, and modified to fit different cultural contexts and learning needs around the world, we are looking at this issue from a global perspective.”

Today UC Irvine announced its partnership with Coursera, the for profit company that was started by two Stanford computer science professors, to provide free online courses to students around the world. You can view UCI’s offerings on Coursera here, which include the following courses:

• Public Health 1: Principles of Public Health
• Fundamentals of Personal Financial Planning
• Microeconomics
• BioSci 93: From DNA to Organisms
• Math 1A/1B Pre-calculus
• Physics 12/21 Science Fact and Fiction (Physics for non-Physics Majors)

In a statement released today, Dean of Continuing Education, Distance Learning and Summer Session, Gary Matkin said, “We are pleased to join other top-ranked universities in adding Coursera and its capabilities to our open educational resources initiative. The initiative is designed to extend the reach of our faculty-created courses and learning materials to students around the world.”

Coursera currently enrolls 1.3 million students around the world, and in using this platform, UCI will expand it reach in the open education movement.

UCI Law School Professor Rick Hasen, an expert on election law, has a new book out titled The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown. A lecture by the same title has been published on the OpenCourseWare site. Hasen’s work is frequenly cited in the media, and just this week, he penned an opinion piece in the New York Times addressing the current partisan fashion that voter fraud is being addressed in the political sphere. If you would like to view the lecture, The Voting Wars that covers some of what’s in the book, click on the link below:

The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown

It’s that time of the year again, when Education-Portal.com prepares to award the People’s Choice Awards for online college course content. This year UCI OpenCourseWare is nominated for Best User Experience. You can vote for UCI OpenCourseWare by clicking on the icon below:

On Thursday, August 2 from 6:00 am to 7:30 am Pacific, the UCI OpenCourseWare site will be down due to server maintenance.

Yesterday we were experiencing some technical difficulties and video could not play on the OpenCourseWare site. That issue has been resolved and video is now available on the site.