# OCWC Logan 08: news and reflections


[![USU Merrill-Cazier
Library](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/143/350111110_a5cd6b979c_m.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/90288178@N00/350111110/ "USU Merrill-Cazier Library")I
just attended the second day of the Open Courseware Consortium
conference in Logan, UT (the first day was for board members only), and
thought I’d report on some of the things that caught my attention, and
also comment on my own thoughts. There was lot’s of other things that I
didn’t cover, much of it can be found in the
[wiki](http://wiki.ocwconsortium.org/index.php?title=September_2008_OCWC_Conference).

**Plenary session\
**Lot’s of organization nitty-gritty, new staff, etc. OCWC now
independent of MIT, next Open Education conference will be at University
of British Columbia, probably aiming for one major international
conference a year, and one smaller topical/regional conference. Thinking
about enabling individual membership in the organization, corporate
members. A special [discipline focus on
health](http://ocwconsortium.org/health) - possibly other discipline
projects later. An upcoming toolkit (or toolshed) with information about
software products, ways of “selling OCW” to an institution, best
practices in copyright clearance etc.

**Connexions** arranging an [open education
conference](http://cnxconference.rice.edu/) in Houston in February 2009
and I think [Tecnologico de Monterey](http://itesm.mx) arranging one in
April 2009.

**[The Open University of the Netherlands](http://www.ou.nl)**: funding
for OCW ends in summer ‘08, but they decided to continue. Dutch high
school students have many “free hours”, and schools are eager for them
to try out university courses. High schools pay for training teachers to
use the material, and for giving exams that provide accreditation of the
learning.

[![MIT
reflection](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1258/1279750389_3e17d80d39_m.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/30201239@N00/1279750389/ "MIT reflection")**[MIT](http://ocw.mit.edu)**
has developed a [portal for high school
students](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/home/home/), which presents the
material most likely to be useful to them - they are considering other
similar portals in the future, perhaps one for example on energy and the
environment. (*Wouldn’t it be great if people were able to interract
with MIT’s site, remixing content, creating lenses or their own
portals?*)

They also syndicate their content through for example [iTunes
University](http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu/) and their [YouTube
channel](http://www.youtube.com/user/mit?ob=4). An interesting new
initiative to make content more accessible is to provide closed
captioning on YouTube videos - like [this
one](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faJ8RXQkk3o) (*while this is
awesome, why not upload it to [dotSub](http://dotsub.com), which allows
you to downlod videos with subtitles, and allow collaborative subtitling
online - so that groups like [Universia](http://ocw.universia.net) and
[CORE](http://www.core.org.cn/) could contribute translated
subtitles?).* They’ve been working with
[3playmedia](http://3playmedia.com/), who I think will present later
this week, on developing the transcription system.

Finally, MIT was proud of their [publisher agreements with for example
Elsevier](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/about/media/elsevier_announce/elsevier_announce.htm),
which enables MIT to publish select material from Elsevier journals as
part of MIT courses, with Creative Commons licenses.

[**Universia**](http://ocw.universia.net/) gave a curious presentation.
They talked about the fact that they had translated metadata for OCW
courses into ten languages, and also normalized the tags used to tag
lectures or courses, so that they were consistent accross languages and
courses. The main reason for this seemed to be search-engine
optimization
([SEO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization)) for
OCW, and they proudly showed off the statistics showing the numbers of
hits increasing - noting for example that the first Google hit on a
particular search in Arabic was a course in Universia. But if the user
clicks through, she finds out that all the material is still in Spanish…
Is this particularly helpful to an Arabic user? We obviously want to
increase the visibility and findability of our offerings, but by
translating huge amounts of metadata before translating the courses, one
runs the risk of being accused of spamming search engines, and annoying
people instead of helping them.

[![Japanese
Garden](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/213/470937597_fd2323e61a_m.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/27917561@N00/470937597/ "Japanese Garden")[**Japanese
OCW**](http://www.jocw.jp/) is interesting, in that they currently have
21 university members, 5 non-profit organizations and 11 companies. I
would like to know more about the role of the company members, whether
they are using the OCW internally (and paying to get around the
non-commercial license?), or even producing their own OCW? (*So far,
these companies are not listed on JOCW’s homepage either, which is quite
unhelpful, since it doesn’t even link to the different courses. They are
supposed to have 806 Japanese courses and 172 in English, but do I have
to click on each institution’s page to find these English courses?*)

**[Johns Hopkins School of Public Health](http://ocw.jhsph.edu/)** has
developed a very interesting [image
library](http://ocw.jhsph.edu/imageLibrary/) of medical images and
graphs that can be used in OCW, much of them harvested from already
existing OCWs. It’s nice if material inside an OCW - pictures, sound
files, illustrations, texts - are made easily available for remix and
reuse outside of the whole package, and this is a good example of that.

**[OpenUniversity UK](http://open.ac.uk)**is distributing their content
in many innovative ways. Because it is all stored as XML, they can
automatically generate a wide variety of formats. In addition, they make
DVDs which are used by prisoners (OpenUniversity has 1,500 students who
are imprisoned). They are also thinking about making their content
available within a hospital setting. Very innovative.

Stian

Photo credits:
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/90288178@N00/350111110/ "srharris")[![Creative
Commons
License](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/plugins/photo-dropper/images/cc.png)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License")
[srharris](http://www.flickr.com/photos/90288178@N00/350111110/ "srharris"),
[joiseyshowaa](http://www.flickr.com/photos/30201239@N00/1279750389/ "joiseyshowaa")
&
[jpellgen](http://www.flickr.com/photos/27917561@N00/470937597/ "jpellgen")