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Almost four years ago we speculated about an Open Global Edcation Network (OGEN), a futuristic education network that would bring Higher Education to anyone, anywhere in the world. "Ideally, OGEN would draw the best content from whichever network node was appropriate, provide the best (human) expert tuition available whenever the user needed it and maintain connection with a manageable (by the user) group of fellow students for whatever level of interaction he or she was comfortable with. The user would be presented with a personalized and seamless educational experience with no awkward leaps back and forth from one walled-garden to another along with jarring changes of style and presentation."	An Open Global Education Network for millions of online learners - fantasy or future? (Peace by Cayusa, on Flickr)
An ideal education network with a co-ordinated global community of millions of online learners and clear pathways to creditation, is not with us yet but four years ago 'raw' Open Courseware (OCW) was about the only discernible ingredient and now exciting recent developments are changing the scene. The following are some of the most notable. 1. The rise of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) MOOCs are 'open' in the sense that anyone can join in and 'massive' in that many do - sometimes several thousand! MOOCs have already been discussed here (including my own involvement in a connectivist MOOC) and now Stanford University has run massive courses on Artifcial Intelligence (AI), Introduction to Databases and Introduction to Machine Learning. The Stanford courses not only provide video lessons typical of Open Courseware but also include quizzes, assignments with feedback and set exams with the possibility of obtaining certification in the form of a statement of accomplishment. These courses have now ended and participant response has been positive although there is some debate about academic standards. (Gundega Dekena has reviewed all 3 courses.)
The Stanford AI course, given by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig attracted over 100,000 enrolments and about 20,000 completed the course. This year Stanford is planning to run further open courses on a range of topics. 2. The expansion of Khan Academy Salman Khan began to compose YouTube videos to help his young cousin in mathematics and now there is an open video library with almost 3,000 videos on various topics. The videos are short, simple and to the point and many have subtitles in different languages. Much of the content is quite basic but still useful to adult learners for revision purposes or to supplement more advanced studies. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization and now, with significant funding from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is rapidly expanding with new features such as practice exercises, learning "coaches" and a community section. (Reviews of Khan Academy are available here and here).	Sal Khan and Stanford professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun discuss the future of technology in education.

3. MIT to give free access to an online course platform

MIT is well known for pioneering Open Courseware (OCW) but OCW usually comes without other desirable parts of the educational process such as expert tuition, interaction among students or learning assessment. Now MIT is investing heavily in an interactive learning platform featuring online laboratories, student-to-student communication and individual assessment leading to a certificate of completion awarded by a not-for-profit body within the institute. Thousands of online learners could take free laboratory-intensive courses, working through quizzes, tests and projects while connecting with other learners. The implications for Higher Education are significant and MIT's initiative has caused considerable interest (see articles and comments here and here). More specifc information has yet to emerge but the first course is expected sometime this Spring.

• 4. Fifteen institutes create the Open Educational Resources University (OERu)

  Several institutions (now 15) are collaborating to form OERu aimed at affordable learning for the very large numbers of worldwide learners who have the motivation and ability to benefit from Higher Education but lack the resources to gain good qualifications. The intention is to provide free learning based on OERs to online learners, anywhere, supported by a global network of volunteers and peers using social networking. Learners will have the opportunity to be assessed at a cost considerably less than normal tuition fees and to earn a recognised qualification from a participating institution. Sources of funding include UNESCO, Pacific States and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. OERu conducts its affairs very openly (see for example the ongoing selection process for its 2012 prototype courses).

The OER university concept.


(Source WikiEducator)

 Plain English    This part is written in simple English to help language understanding and translation. If English is not your first language try the 'Google Translate' gadget on the right side of this page - choose your language and Google will give a translation.

The page above gives information on 4 important developments that are helping to build free and open global education networks that can provide tuition, contact between learners and professors and a path to good qualifications. This is in addition to the usual Open Courseware (OCW) that many universities and colleges already make available. How can you benefit from any of these developments? That depends very much on your own learning objectives (see Guide for the International Online Learner).

Khan Academy (see (2) above) provides short videos, tuition and simple exercises on basic topics. This could be useful in finding out what you already know - and don't know! If you have strong interests in Information Technology (IT) then look at the Stanford courses (see (1) above). These courses have now finished so consider joining one at a later date. The new MIT courses (see (3) above) have not started yet so watch out for further details. If you do join a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) try to help others as well as helping yourself - this is how a course with so many learners can become very effective!

OERu (see (4) above) is another project to watch, particularly if you are interested in a good qualification from an established university or college. Other 'free' universities and websites that support online learners are listed here.

Please enjoy whatever celebrations the end of the year may bring !

We also wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year.

iBerry's mission is to foster free and open Higher Education by every appropriate means but there are many ways of going about this. Your feedback and help is always valuable - please contact us!

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We are experiencing problems with the 'unsorted links' ('iBerry on Delicious') attached to many sections of the Open Education Directory. These are bookmarked with delicious.com, now under new ownership so changes are evidently being made to RSS feeds etc. Please bear with us while this gets sorted out. If necessary we will use another service.

Update: our problems now seem to be restricted to delicious 'bundles'; i.e. where several tags are grouped together under one name so although feeds for single tags seem to be OK anything using 'bundles' is not working or returning an error messsage. I understand from the delicious forum that this will be put right in due course but I am unclear as to when or in what form so I'll just leave things as they are now in the hope that things improve soon. Note that all this only affects the display of unsorted links on our pages here - you can always go to iBerry on Delicious and find our unsorted links there (I hope!).

I've been playing with Google Translate, trying to assess what role automatic language translation could play for online learners. Here are some translations of the UN Covenant quote from iBerry's mission statement. Reverse translation to English suggests that these translations are far from perfect - I wonder whether any native speakers can confirm this? . . . . . .