UCI OpenCourseWare Project

Anka Mulder is the General Secretary of the Technological University of Delft (Netherlands), which houses one of the premiere OpenCourseWare projects, including full masters degrees’ worth of materials in nanotechnology, water resource management and other subjects. Now serving her second term as President of the Board of Directors of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, she is a driving force in moving the OCW movement toward a learner-centric model.

Fast Company has just featured her as one of the 100 most creative people in business – well, the business of higher education in this case. You can read the article and its accompanying interview here.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium, comprised of 250 universities around the world, has a special importance here at UCI. The OCW Consortium is both a mechanism for multi-university, global projects, like its recent Open Education Week, and it shines a light on people and institutions who play important roles in open education. The Chair of UCI’s Public Health Department, Oladele Ogunseitan, received the ACE Leadership Award for his early commitment to OpenCourseWare and open education.

Gary Matkin and I have collaborated with Anka for five years already. Fast Company couldn’t have found a better individual to feature for her contributions and the favorable light she casts on all of our activity.

Dr. Oladele Ogunseitan, UCI’s professor of public health and founding Chair of the department of Population Health and Disease Prevention at the  is a recipient of the OpenCourseWare Leadership Excellence (ACE) Award, given by OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW Consortium). Ogunseitan received the prestigious Leadership ACE award in recognition of his role in raising the profile of the UC Irvine free and open education site.

“It is an honor to receive this recognition from the OCW Consortium,” said Ogunseitan. “It’s important that more colleges and universities embrace this movement and add their courses and lectures to the OCW Consortium’s catalogue to increase access to higher education around the world.”

Read more.

The UC Irvine iTunes U courses are:
• PubHlth 200: Foundations of Public Health – This course, created by Dr. Oladele Ogunseitan, teaches participants with an overarching framework, principles, and core responsibilities of public health research, and offers the necessary foundation for advanced studies in public health.
• Physics 20b: Introduction to Cosmology – The course, created by Professor James Bullock, provides students with an overview of modern scientific cosmology, including discussion of stars, the Milky Way galaxy, black holes, dark matter, the big bang, and evidence for our current understanding of the universe.
• Chem 51A: Organic Chemistry – Students who participate in this course, created by Dr. James Nowick, will learn concepts relating to carbon compounds with an emphasis on structural theory and the nature of chemical bonding, stereochemistry, reaction mechanisms, and spectroscopic, physical, and chemical properties of the principal classes of these compounds.
• Chem 203: Organic Spectroscopy – This graduate chemistry course, created by Professor James Bullock, covers organic spectroscopy, and addresses topics including mass spectrometry, ultraviolet, chiroptical, infrared, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Read full press release.

Some of the world’s most renowned colleges and universities  offer free courses to self-learners. This list ranks schools based on their OpenCourseWare.  UC Irvine’s OpenCourseWare project is ranked #7.

Read full article.

OC Metro Recognizes UC Irvine’s Significant Contribution to Open Education Week.

Several months ago, the OpenCourseWare Consortium launched a call for Open Education Week, to be celebrated March 5-10, 2012. Now, joined by hundreds of university and organizational supporters, Open Education Week is fulfilling its role in calling attention to both an urgent need to expand global access to higher education and to raise awareness among universities, governments, and organizations of the resources that already exist. Chancellor Drake has now added his voice to this important cause. While it will be broadcast nationally on UCTV during Open Education Week, the video can be seen now by clicking on the image below.

UCI OpenCourseWare is supporting the effort through webcasting six full days of video lectures from UCI’s classrooms, conferences, seminars and events.

More than 144 hours of our best faculty lectures will be made available for free with the launch of a new UCI OpenCourseWare project called Open Education TV. The launch, which will allow viewers worldwide to follow video-taped classes, seminars and conferences at their convenience, coincides with the first annual Open Education Week scheduled for March 5-10 by the global OpenCourseWare Consortium. 

For more information follow this link.

For questions, email Kathy Tam at kstam@uci.edu.

Today President Obama announced that he would request $80 million in new government funding to enhance math and science education in the US. The administration’s goal is to train 100,000 specialized teachers to help product 1 million more American graduates in science, technology, engineering and math during the next ten years.

UCI OpenCourseWare already has materials to assist teachers in passing the CSET exam, which is required to teach math and science in California public schools. Test preparation courses include subjects ranging from algebra to molecular biology. Click here to view our CSET resources.

The Saylor Foundation, an open education non-profit, has begun to release the first wave of free college textbooks that have undergone editing and peer review. The latest textbook is Mathematical Analysis I, but all of the most common subjects taught at the university level will have corresponding free textbooks available at the end of the second wave of their project. Purdue University has already adopted the Mathematical Analysis text for one course.

The Saylor Foundation incentivizes authors by awarding up to $20,000 for textbooks in exchange for the use of an open license. Details can be found here.

Are you a UCI professor or lecturer who is looking into contributing to the Saylor initiative or who is interested in using its textbooks? We’re interested in hearing your story. Please give us a call at 949-824-9976 or email us at ljcooper at uci dot edu.

Open Education Week, March 5-10-, 2012, was launched by the OpenCourseWare Consortium and endorsed by UNESCO and a large number of universities and university consortia worldwide. Its goal is to create greater awareness of the many free learning opportunities not only for current students, but for those who would not otherwise have the opportunity. The open education movement seeks to marry educational access and opportunity to learners worldwide free of cost. UCI OpenCourseWare is an important project within this movement and has grown to include nearly 80 full courses as well as hundreds of hours of video lectures. To celebrate Open Education Week, we are providing a 24×7 scheduled webcast of classes, seminars, and events originally presented by UCI professors and lecturers and invited guests.