education

In preparation of my talk on open courseware and web 2.0 technologies and how and why I share my course content by web 2.0 technologies, I came across the list of the Top 10 Universities With Free Courses Online. Many thanks to Jimmy Ruska for compiling this list. The list does offer direct links to webcasts, RSS feeds, videos, podcasts, along with informations what other free resources like media players are required.

In the beginning Google started to offer a search engine for programming code. Now they are taking it even further. If you want to learn more about certain programming techniques or aspects of computer science, Google Code University might be a place you would like to visit. On this side they provide tutorials and link to course content related to  current computing technologies. While the emphasis is on web-based technologies other topics are also covered.

This report gives a very interesting overview of the current state and possible trends in open educational practices and resources. The report was compiled by the "Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS)" project funded by the European Commission.

One of the important messages of the report is that educational practices have to change considerably in order to make the best use of open educational resources. Barriers identified in the report include:

After reading David Muir's blog entry "Education: product or process" that was triggered by George Siemens' blog "How things change...", I felt quickly that education must be a process. But I never had really thought about it. My main argument is that a product would be well defined and finished at some time. I am looking at education as something always ongoing. So it does not meet the criteria of a product.