Invited Talks

John Dehlin

THE OPENCOURSEWARE MOVEMENT AND CROSS-INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF OPEN COURSE MATERIALS

Abstract
In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began offering course materials online for free and open use. 6 years later, over 160 universities and institutions from more than 20 countries have joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium, sharing (in aggregate) over 5,000 courses online, in 10 different languages. Literally millions of learners across the globe access OpenCourseWare materials monthly.The traditional model for OpenCourseWare thus far has been "individual universities/professors sharing existing course materials on their institutional web sites." However, a new potential model for OpenCourseWare is in discussion -- which is to begin providing support for the cross-institutional collaborative creation of new course materials for free and open use (much like the open software or wiki models of today). Meanwhile, bioinformatics educational programs simultaneously suffer from a shortage of faculty and the breadth of the field; a problem shared by any rapidly developing interdisciplinary field. In August 2005, the Bioinformatics Curriculum Collaboration (BCC) formed independently, with the intent to create a community dedicated to the development of original, open access content for a cohesive teaching program at the introductory graduate level. The BCC has expressed an interest in partnering with us develop this model, so this session has been created to: 1) provide an overview of the OpenCourseWare movement: past, present and future, and 2) begin exploring ways that the OpenCourseWare consortium can work together with the open access Bioinformatics and Computational Biology community to begin developing a prototype/model for the cross-institutional development of OpenCourseWare courses -- which can then be utilized by all other academic and professional disciplines. Come help us make history for the open education movement.