iBerry

The amount of available Open Courseware (OCW) has increased considerably this year and this is to be welcomed but it is becoming inceasingly difficult for us to keep up with the avalanche. As an experiment, we are hoping to speed up the process of entering items in the Open Courseware Directory by making our lists of unchecked websites public on delicious. These websites may possibly be suitable for the Open Courseware Directory, either as OCW or Higher Education Resource items.

Anyone is welcome to comment on these websites or, better still, visit some and create suitable entries for the directory. Also, if you have an account with delicious you can very easily recommend a link for the Directory by including the tag, for:iberry along with any others.

Some guidelines for submitting or recommending websites for the Directory:

• Academic Level - the Directory covers "Higher Education" in the widest sense including university or college, undergraduate or postgraduate courseware and resources as well as "adult education" material at an equivalent level.
• Open Courseware - this should be freely and publicly accessible and significant in content: e.g. an OCW item should normally contain detailed lecture notes, slides or videoed lectures rather than only a syllabus or course summary. A short description should be provided (this can often be copied and pasted from the website - see the Directory for examples)
• Higher Education Resources - the idea here is not to be comprehensive but to provide a relatively small number of links to the best websites that in turn provide comprehensive links and guidance covering particular subject areas.

This table provides a quick search of the Open Courseware Directory. (For more detailed searches see 'Open Courseware Directory - Advanced Search' in the left sidebar. A Subject Index is also available)

Go to the square corresponding to the intersection of

The availability of Open Courseware (OCW) is now widespread (as our Open Courseware Directory will confirm) but OCW usually comes without important parts of the educational process such as expert tuition, assessment or interaction with fellow students (see Everyone Has the Right to Education) and this significantly detracts from its usefulness. I suspect that many people who visit OCW sites such as MIT pick the courses that seem most immediately attractive to them, probably the ones with videoed lectures, perhaps glance at any lecture notes and then quickly move on. There is nothing wrong with that of course and perhaps a few seeds are sown but not much in the way of education compared with a committed student who studies the same courses at university or college. On the other hand there are also discriminating self-learners capable of navigating through reams of OCW, choosing courses at an appropriate level and who have the necessary self-discipline to study in depth over a significant period of time. In general, most learners will fall somewhere between these two extremes and are likely to benefit from some kind of support.

In keeping with our concept of the Open Global Education Network we would now like to provide some form(s) of support for learners. Some considerations are:

An improved search tool has now been installed that we hope will provide more efficient searching of the Open Courseware Directory. You can now choose any number of tags from 'Subject', 'Media Type' and 'Academic Level' to identify all OCW items either having all your chosen tags (Boolean AND) or any of your tags (Boolean OR). For example: select all OCW items with tags, 'Intermediate', 'Biosciences', 'Exams'.

Please try the Category Browser and let us have any comments.

Note that the tags that appear in red underneath every OCW item belong to that item but if you click on one, then all items in the directory having that tag are displayed.

Unlike all the other sources brought together by our News Aggregator only a very small number of the stories we pick up from this publication provide open access to the full text version by non-subscribed users. The 'teasers' available to our visitors seem to be more useful in advertising the Chronicle than providing our visitors with much useful information. We are therefore proposing to delete the Chronicle from our sources - if anyone feels strongly about this please comment!

Note that the UK publication, 'The Times Higher Education Supplement' has already been deleted for similar reasons.

Google has recently released Lively, a 3D environment that runs in your browser. You can join one of many existing rooms or set up your own as we have done here as an experiment. To enter our room ('The Porthole') you'll need a Google account (free via Google) but otherwise you are free to use our room for chat or anything within reason. For example, try creating and moving furniture etc. I've had little time to look at this and would be grateful for any suggestions as to how iBerry could use such an environment. Bear in mind that Lively is probably in an early stage of development and further innovation might well make it more attractive for educational purposes.

Welcome to more than 150 visitors from India today! A sudden increase in visitor numbers is usually because iBerry has been mentioned on another site or a blog but this time we have not been able to find out anything. We would be grateful if somebody from India could let us know!

Please note that you do not need to register unless you intend to visit us again (see registration FAQ below). Also, if you register you must pick up our email with your initial password which must be changed as it is only valid for 1 week.

Thanks for your interest!

• What is Open Courseware (OCW)?

  "Courseware" implies any type of "knowledge product" associated with the delivery of a lecture course or program of study. Digitised material such as lecture notes, handouts, slides, tutorial material, exam questions, quizzes, videos and demonstrations are all typical examples. "Open Courseware" is courseware that has been made publicly available, free of charge, by the author to any user with web access anywhere in the world. To find out more about OCW take a look at some of the websites in this section of the iBerry Open Courseware Directory.

• As a self-learner, can I use Open Courseware to construct my own program of study?

  Yes of course you can but