 |
Home > MSI Degree > Course Catalogue > Course Description
SI 521: Special Topics: Teaching, Learning and Research in an Open University
This course introduces students to the Open Educational Resources spectrum, including open content, such as open courseware, open access initiatives, open publishing of research and learning materials as found in open journals and databases, open textbooks, related open software efforts such as open learning systems, and open teaching experiments. The course surveys these OER efforts, their history, and their underlying motivations in the context of how information technologies have made such activities possible. It investigates how such efforts are informed by liberal education and intellectual property notions, looks at recent statements about the importance of OER for research and education by members of the academy and national research organizations, and looks at how they affect the practices -- and self-perceptions -- of a community of scholars like the University of Michigan.
In each of these areas, the course discusses specific ongoing OER projects with University of Michigan administrators, faculty, researchers, staff, and students involved in the development, provision, and analysis of OER, including the Medical School’s open medical curriculum initiative, the U-M Library’s open access efforts, the Scholarly Publishing Office’s open publishing experiments, a Michigan Engineering chemical process dynamics open textbook, the UM-based open proteomics database project, intellectual property clarification, definition and education projects supported by the U-M Library, efforts at open content generation assisted by university counsel, and open learning classes taught at U-M. The course discusses technical, social, and educational questions that OER raise for a community of scholars like the University of Michigan, including questions surrounding their generation, availability, use and value to the University community.
This course takes advantage of the fact that we have in the School of Information, and at the University of Michigan, key players in the formation and analysis of a number of recent entries into the OER field. Through this work, there has developed an extended social network with participants in OER projects internationally and locally that will form the subjects of the course’s case examples. Founder-developers, managers, faculty, administrators, organizational leads, and current project principals -- as well as participants from each of these projects -- come into the class for students to hear from and question as the course progresses.
Credits: 3
Term offered: Winter
Home > MSI Degree > Course Catalogue > Course Description
|
|
|
|
