International Open Course Library Project

Draft notes, thoughts, ideas and questions

 * This project is inspired by the Open Course Library Project, led by [mailto:cgreen@sbctc.edu Cable Green] @ the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, in Washington State (article).
 * identify the highest enrolled 81 courses in the Washington's 34 Community and Technical Colleges
 * provide a grant incentive to develop these courses on condition they are licensed as OER (CC BY)
 * specify that the cost of required instructional materials must be less than $30
 * The International Open Course Library Project is a "hack" of the Open Course Library Project, and is aimed at scaling the model internationally. The idea is to invite individual states, provinces and countries to list their highest enrolled 50 courses, map these to existing open textbooks and open courseware, identify gaps and potential for remix among similar in-country or in-state initiatives.
 * We will collectively build a matrix that shows, for example, the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of enrollments in “Psychology 101,” and links to all of the “Psychology 101” open textbooks and open courseware.
 * Where there are gaps in the open course / textbook matrix (e.g., we collectively can’t find a high quality “Sociology 101” textbook), we agree to collectively submit a grant for private and/or public funding to create and maintain the needed content and openly license (CC BY) it so anyone can use and modify it freely.
 * How is the World's Best First Year online project progressing? This is an innovative OER project led by Athabasca University.
 * Are there any other similar international initiatives?
 * What about OER Africa
 * also, didn't the Shuttleworth folks (Mark Surman), etc. just put together OER curricula - it was for secondary purposes I think).


 * More ideas to come ...

Progress so far

 * Have been in touch with the New Zealand Ministry of Education and we have raw data on the top 50 courses -- but need to do some further aggregation work because this is an absolute count of the top 50 enrolled courses from NZ institutions. It does not aggregate for enrolments of the same courses / similar courses with lower enrolments at other institutions. New Zealand doesn't have a generic national course code for courses. Need to do further work on the number crunching.
 * Cable is locating partners in US States ... and is working to gather enrollment data on States' "Top 50 Courses."

Relevant Links

 * Sales impact of publisehd books when providing free digital versions -- Research study by John Hilton
 * Free textbook page on WikiEducator
 * WikiPublishing on WikiEducator