Open Research course logo (CC-BY 4.0 OER Research Hub)

It’s now been a couple of weeks since we formally ended our four-week Open Research course on P2PU … And what a month it was! We had 139 people sign up to the course, which looked at the theory and practice of open research, how you can be ethical and open, how to disseminate in the open and open reflection. You can view the course materials here.

From the very first discussions about the course last fall with Jane Park at Creative Commons to the team brainstorming the course early in 2014, spending several months co-authoring the course and developing assets, going through School of Open’s community review, getting the course up on the P2PU platform, creating our badge, and running the course itself, it’s been a fascinating and rewarding process. Collaboration was central to building the course and as an earlier blog post shows continuous evaluation and input was essential to make Open Research possible.

As a team we’re still reflecting on the experience of creating and running the course, but would like to thank everyone who contributed, commented, reviewed materials and participated. The range of course participants, from all over the world and with all kinds of backgrounds and interests in open research, who joined us on the Hangouts and commented in the forums or used the course Twitter hashtag (#openresearch) was quite amazing and it was a privilege to work with so many people who were keen to share their ideas and experiences during the course.

We look forward to building on the success of this first iteration of Open Research, while also looking at where we can improve the material and course design. A post-course survey, forum comments and blog posts by participants as well as the team’s reflections will all feed into this review process. In addition, if you did not participate in the course but have suggestions or feedback, we would welcome your thoughts via this Hackpad. A second facilitated version of the course is planned for early 2015 and a stand-alone version will also be made available.

Thanks again to everyone who made the course possible!

School of Open Kenya

SOO Kenya Popjam / Jamlab / CC BY-SA

Simeon from Jamlab says, “We hosted 20 girls from Precious Blood Secondary School, Riruta for the [launch] event. The goal was to work with these students to map out education as they currently experience it in their school and figure out how best to incorporate Open Education in their learning. For most of the afternoon, the emphasis on the workshop centered on figuring out how the students could incorporate Open Education in their learning. After a brief discussion, we mapped out learning and education activities as follows:

• Lectures/Class instruction
• Private study/prep
• Group study
• Revision of past examination papers
• Student Symposiums

We asked them if we could add aspects of Open Education to this list. Very few of the students had heard about Open Education or understood its value at this point. We discussed Open Education in a little more detail: We explored the concept of the commons, copyright and copyleft and how the Creative Commons suite of licenses has enabled the Open Education movement globally.”

The future of SOO Kenya:

“One of the themes that stood out is getting school administrations and teachers to understand and make an investment in Open Education. This will be Jamlab’s focus in the coming year. While we work with administrators and teachers, we encouraged students to begin to demonstrate the value of Open Education by creating demand for it in the following ways: consume OER’s and integrate them in their learning, and pro-actively create and share OER’s with other students from other schools.”

School of Open Tanzania

SOO Tanzania launch / CC Tanzania / CC BY

Paul from CC Tanzania says, “The program officially launched at Academic International Primary School (AIPS) in Dar es Salaam whereby 15 students from grades four to seven got the opportunity to learn how to code, designing animated picture (cartoons) by using open educational resources through the web.”

The future of SOO Tanzania:

“The event also marked the launch of three other training programs around ICT empowerment training for unemployed youth, teaching persons with disabilities how to use computers, and training educators on using ICT to improve how they teach their students in Tanzania that will be coordinated by CC Tanzania and the Open University of Tanzania.”

CC Tanzania will also highlight the importance of open access to research during Open Access Week in collaboration with the Tanzania Medical Students Association (TAMSA).

School of Open Nigeria

SOO Nigeria Saturday training / K-Why / CC BY

Kayode from CC Nigeria says, “Creative Commons Nigeria with support from Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Linux Professional Institute (Nigerian Master Affiliate) and Mozilla Foundation hosted the School of Open. The School of Open is a five week open course that holds every Saturday between 11am till 4pm. The first week started on September 13th with participants been trained on the basics of Intellectual Property, Linux Operating System and using simple Mozilla tools to design websites.”

The future of SOO Nigeria:

The five-week programs wrapped over the weekend with a discussion on plans for sustaining the community. The next phase will be to take School of Open Nigeria online with the present participants acting as moderators. Meanwhile, people and institutions in two different states (Imo State and Obafemi Awolowo University, Osun State) have requested that Creative Commons Nigeria come replicate School of Open in their societies. The aim of School of Open Nigeria will be to have an online learning place where people can go to learn at any time without any cost or time restrictions.

School of Open South Africa

Kumusha Bus / WikiAfrica / CC BY-SA

Kelsey from CC South Africa says they already ran their School of Open CC4Kids course as part of Code4CT’s Maker Party back in July, and since then have been planning the next phase of Kumusha Bus, aka Kumusha Bus 2.0, which is “a remix of Libre Bus and designed to ensure collaboration with local members of the open community to have a week of Open Movement chaos and fun that spreads the ideas behind the movement and gets more people and organisations involved in your country.” Kumusha Bus is a collaboration of WikiAfrica, Creative Commons, and School of Open.

The future of SOO South Africa:
Kelsey & co are planning to expand CC4Kids into a full course pack designed to teach kids about Wikipedia, open journalism, open data, and open/citizen science. As part of this expansion, a session will be run at the upcoming Mozilla Festival called “OpenMe – Kids Can Open”.

More about the future

School of Open Africa is hosting another event next week, 22 October, to launch its entrance into the higher education space. Four courses will be developed in collaboration with the C4DLab, the University of Nairobi’s innovation hub, and will be licensed CC BY. The project is a response to ICT playing a critical role in expanding the knowledge economy of Africa; the OER will be developed by and for Africans; and the hope is to replicate the process in other universities. In addition, certificates will be awarded to participants of CC Kenya’s CopyrightX satellite from earlier this year, a panel discussion on OER will be featured, and SOO Kenya will present its work to date. The event and C4DLab OER project is made possible with technical support from UNESCO and generous support from the Hewlett Foundation. Stay tuned for a more detailed announcement of this event next week!

At its core, School of Open is about equipping communities with the tools to help them do what they already do better. Creative Commons licenses and the open resources they enable empowers users around the world to, as Simeon of SOO Kenya says, “build on what we already know.” He says,

I think one thing we often forget to highlight when it comes to education is how we learn… We learn by building on what we already know. We believe Open Education is one sure way of building on what we already know to advance ourselves.

We are seeking to expand School of Open to other regions, in and beyond Africa. The upcoming Mozilla Festival will feature a session on mapping School of Open programs from around the world and hone in on areas with maximum potential for impact — where we can “train the trainers” or otherwise empower student and educator communities to start up programs for themselves. Find out how you can get involved!

What is Copyright 4 Educators (AUS)?

Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) is a free online course for anyone who wants to learn about Australian copyright law, statutory licensing, educational exceptions and open educational resources (OER). It is open to all educators around the world, specifically targeted to teachers, teacher-librarians from K-12, and university students studying to become teachers in Australia. The course material is learnt around practical case studies faced by teachers when using copyright material in their day-to-day teaching and educational instruction.

The Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) course is not taught; it is facilitated by course leaders. The course emphasizes student participation. Students are divided into small groups in which they organise their online communications/discussions (via email, Google docs, Skype, tokbox, and other tools) and jointly submit answers to each week’s task.

The course leaders review each group’s work that has been submitted to that week’s Google document and provide feedback. As stated above, the leaders act as facilitators rather than traditional teachers.

The Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) course has successfully been run seven times previously.

Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) – Next Cycle

The next Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) course will run for seven weeks, with a two-week introduction period and five weeks of substantive material. Each week covering substantive material will be comprised of a different case scenario and tasks. Each group will have one week to complete each week’s tasks and two days to provide peer review to two other groups.

Course Breakdown by weeks:

1. October 27: Welcome to the course and introductory questionnaire

Course participants acquaint themselves with the course and introduce themselves by answering a questionnaire. The questionnaires should be completed by Sunday November 2.

2. November 3: Group meet and greet

Course participants are divided into groups – meet and greet with fellow group members as well as become acquired with the ICT tools needed in the course, which will allow the group members to make a decision on the collaborative tool the group will use. This decision should be made by November 9 in preparation for your first group task in week 3.

3. November 10: Copyright Basics

Week 3 is the first week of substantive material, covering copyright basics such as subject matter categories, whether copyright applies, and copyright ownership. Group answers need to be submitted to that week’s google doc by the end of Sunday November 16, and peer review needs to be completed by the Tuesday after the assignment is due, ie November 18.

4. November 17: Statutory licences

Week 4 covers statutory licences and what teachers are and are not permitted to do under the statutory licences. Group answers need to be submitted to that week’s google doc by the end of Sunday November 23, and peer review needs to be completed by the Tuesday after the assignment is due, ie November 25.

5. November 24: Educational exceptions

Week 5 covers educational exceptions and smartcopying techniques that allow teachers to use copyright material outside of the statutory licences, without the permission of the copyright owners and without paying any fees. Group answers need to be submitted to that week’s google doc by the end of Sunday November 30, and peer review needs to be completed by the Tuesday after the assignment is due, ie December 2.

6. December 1: OER

Week 6 covers open educational resources (OER). OER are a great alternative to copyright material as it removes copyright questions and allows teachers to do much more with the material. These resources are completely free for any individual to use, are licensed for unrestricted distribution, and allow the possibility of adaptation, translating, re-mix, and improvement. Group answers need to be submitted to that week’s google doc by the end of Sunday December 7, and peer review needs to be completed by the Tuesday after the assignment is due, ie December 9.

7. December 8: Law Reform

Week 7 builds on everything that’s been covered in the course and requires groups to think about copyright law reform. Group answers need to be submitted to that week’s google doc by the end of Sunday December 14, and peer review needs to be completed by the Tuesday after the assignment is due, ie December 16.

Further information on Copyright 4 Educators

There is further information on the Copyright 4 Educators (Aus) course website where you can look at the course information, the weekly tasks and readings. There is also more information on how groups meet and communicate.

Please feel free to browse and/or enroll in the other courses offered through P2PU. The courses offered in the School of Open and the School of Education may be of specific interest to educators.

What do I need to do to enroll in Copyright 4 Educators?

Enrollments will not be open until October 20, 2014. In the last cycle of the course, enrollments filled in three days, so if you’re interested in taking the course, we recommend you plan to enroll early.

When enrollments are open:

To enroll, you will need to go to the course page, and simply click ‘Start course’ at the bottom left under the menu.

Note the ‘Start course’ button will not appear until October 20th. To enroll, you will need to sign in or create an account on P2PU, which is free and takes only a few minutes.

Please pass along this information to anyone whom you think may be interested in learning about copyright and copyright compliance strategies.

______________

Photo credit: “Free Stock: Copyright sign 3D render” by Muses Touch available athttp://www.flickr.com/photos/musestouch/8511965675/ under a CC Attribution licence

(SOO logo here. Earth icon licensed CC BY by Erin Standley from the Noun Project.)

Called Popjam, this SOO launch event + Mozilla Maker Party will be a day-long workshop introducing high school students to Open Educational Resources (OER). Students will learn how to use OER and the open web to complement their academic studies. Students from four high schools will participate: Precious Blood Secondary School, Nairobi School, Sunshine Secondary School, and State House Girls Secondary School. SOO Kenya is hosted by Jamlab, a co-creation community based in Nairobi for high school students and graduates in Africa.

For more information about the event, and to RSVP if you’re in Nairobi, visit the event page.

About Maker Party

School of Open and Creative Commons is excited to be partnering with Mozilla to celebrate teaching and learning the web with Maker Party. Through thousands of community-run events around the world, Maker Party unites educators, organizations and enthusiastic Internet users of all ages and skill levels.

We share Mozilla’s belief that the web is a global public resource that’s integral to modern life: it shapes how we learn, how we connect and how we communicate. But many of us don’t understand its basic mechanics or what it means to be a citizen of the web. That’s why we’re supporting this global effort to teach web literacy through hands-on learning and making with Maker Party.

(SOO logo here. Earth icon licensed CC BY by Erin Standley from the Noun Project.)

In Tanzania, CC Tanzania is hosting a creative event for kids at the Open University of Tanzania, the first university in the region to offer open and distant learning programs. Kids will use the Internet and open educational resources to create animations. This event occurs today, see the Maker Party page for details. It marks the launch of three training programs around ICT empowerment training for unemployed youth, teaching persons with disabilities how to use computers, and training educators on using ICT to improve how they teach their students.

In Nigeria, CC Nigeria is hosting a web building skills event for the public at the Nigerian Institute for Advanced Legal Studies at the University of Lagos. Anyone may join to learn how to build the web and share creative works through Mozilla and CC tools. The opening ceremony and maker party are tomorrow, see the Maker Party page for details. The event also marks the launch of a five-week training program around Nigerian copyright and Linux Operating System. During the opening ceremony, SOO Nigeria’s facilitators, partners and supporters will meet and set expectations for program participants. See the School of Open Nigeria page for more details. You can follow SOO Nigeria on Facebook and Twitter, using the hashtags #SOOAfrica and #MakerParty.

School of Open launch events are also set to occur in Kenya and South Africa — stay tuned! (Read more about their plans here.)

About Maker Party

School of Open and Creative Commons are excited to be partnering with Mozilla to celebrate teaching and learning the web with Maker Party. Through thousands of community-run events around the world, Maker Party unites educators, organizations and enthusiastic Internet users of all ages and skill levels.

We share Mozilla’s belief that the web is a global public resource that’s integral to modern life: it shapes how we learn, how we connect and how we communicate. But many of us don’t understand its basic mechanics or what it means to be a citizen of the web. That’s why we’re supporting this global effort to teach web literacy through hands-on learning and making with Maker Party.

Why did we have the 2nd OER Summer Camp?

The summer of 2013 was special for the CC China Mainland team, Wenzhou Medical University and Guokr.com. These three parties co-hosted OER summer camp which was successfully initiated on Luxi Island. For Wenzhou Medical University, the summer camp has already been a part of its routine volunteering activities for five consecutive years. But it’s the first time for them to connect such a camp with the CC China Mainland Project. The latter, to their surprise, brought something fresh this time; a real world OER activity in rural China took shape.

The first OER summer camp received great feedback, not only from volunteers of Wenzhou Medical University that participated, but from the officials of Luxi Island, and more importantly, from the students of Luxi Public School.

Can we create some OER courses?

The first successful but not flawless camp greatly encouraged us to hold the second one. We thought there was a lot of room for improvement, especially that more CC-licensed OER should be included. In addition to OER available online, we wondered if we could make some interesting online courses ourselves for the kids within our reach. And based on feedback, “How to make herbarium” was regarded as the most interesting course during the first camp.

“We hope to make a difference,” said volunteers from Wenzhou Medical University. “why not make some courses based on our knowledge as medical students? We believe that would be more interesting and flexible.”

What courses did we create?

All preparations went smoothly by volunteers, days before the launch of the camp. Wenzhou Medical University’s student center, which provides opportunities for students to start small businesses within the campus, happened to have a photography studio. Undoubtedly, it was chosen to be our “OER course studio” for making videos of the courses. About 12 volunteers participated and 16 different courses were recorded, of which 14 were used, including:

1. The introduction of traffic signs (video)

2. Comprehensive water treatment, namely sewage treatment, flood prevention, drainage, water supply and water saving. The course was concentrated on how to identify water quality (video)

ZHU Renkai / CC BY

3. Interesting Japanese language (video)

WANG Hongying / CC BY

4. Traditional Chinese handwork: stamp, tri-colored glazed pottery of the Tang Dynasty and blue and white porcelain. The courses teach students aged from 11-13, on how to create this handwork.

• Course 1 video
• Course 2 video
• Course 3 video

WAN Yu / CC BY

5. Interesting Traditional Chinese Medicine: introduce some basic knowledge about TCM, which is relevant to students daily lives. (video)

WANG Hongying / CC BY

6. Interesting history: the introduction of some historical events which had significant impact on China. (video)

ZHU Renkai / CC BY

7. Presentation skills: How to give a presentation or host an event? How to present yourself in front of people with confidence? (video)

8. Course for senior citizens on the island: including some basic knowledge of labor contract if any of their family members are immigrant workers in other provinces; living knowledge such as why some vegetables can’t be cooked together etc.
(video)

WANG Hongying / CC BY

9. Pink ribbon: the course was designed for females on the island by Wenzhou Medical University volunteers. The presenter is a Clinical Medicine Science major student; she introduces relevant knowledge of breast cancer, including how to prevent it from happening. (video)

YANG Jiayi / CC BY

10. Muscle-bone strengthening exercise: Through proper adjustment in human body and correct method for breath (muscle, bone etc.), the exercise can help to improve blood circulation and the functions of internal organs of the body (heart, spleen, liver, lungs and kidneys). (video)

11. Interesting Oral English: Mr. Percy provides kids with some simple and easy oral English. (video)

12. MOOC from Guokr: how to select good quality fruit? A special designed course for kids (link)

Feedback from Participants of the 2nd Luxi Summer Camp

Students’ comments on the OER summer camp:

CHEN Xinhao, Grade One:

We had many different courses, and learnt a lot from our teachers. Besides, discipline plays a big role in our classes. I learnt how to be strong, even if being injured, I didn’t cry. Teachers cared us a lot and we can feel the love from their hearts. Maybe next time, we can have more classified courses based on our exiting knowledge. I sincerely hope that they can come again; we really like all these teachers.

CHEN Yanjie, Grade Four:

I enjoyed my stay with teachers, from their daily lives, I learnt how to be strong, independent and insistent on my dreams. Teachers gave us so many supports and encouragement. Same time, I got to know my weak points and believe that I can always do better. I really hope they can come and visit us next summer, by binging knowledge and happiness. I like my teachers.

MIAO Xiaoting, Grade Four:

Though I can’t fully understand the class, I think all classes are great and interesting. Teachers really tried hard to explain us. I like this kind of teaching and will try my best to learn in future. I enjoyed the play time with teachers after class. It’s funny to play games and take photos together. So many unforgettable moments. I hope all of them can come back next summer. I love them! In order to provide us good classed, teachers’ preparation task lasted late at night and got up early in the morning. I hope they can have good rest after back home.

ZHENG Ruize, Grade Six:

One of the important things I learnt from these teachers is always be diligent, humble and hard work. I believe that I can walk out of this island and get to know the world outside. Now I’m on Grade Six, and will be in mid school soon. I think I will work harder in future and let myself become an excellent student with the days to come. I really hope after grow-up, I can back to the island with teacher, to support more kids in this island. I hope all teachers would take good care of themselves. I like them all and look forward to seeing them again with diversified courses.

Volunteers’ comments on OER summer camp:

QIN Xu, age 19, major in Law:

The most impressive thing happened in summer camp is the process of making courses. It’s a very interesting to be a teacher for others. Besides, team work always makes things earlier to proceed and get diversified thoughts on how to do it. Personally, to being a teacher in front of so many students in different ages made me overcome the fear in facing a camera, become more confident.

PAN Yixiu, age 19, major in Traditional Chinese Medicine:

After being a volunteer for the summer camp, I understand that when kids made mistakes, the last thing to do is to blame them, but let them know why this is not the right thing to do. Taking a trans-positional consideration always helps in communications. As a teacher, we should encourage, praise them, other than criticize or disappoint them. Only by doing so, they create a new world with more confidence.

LIU Hanzhong, age 19, major in rehabilitation:

This volunteering experience really made me feel that kid’s world is so clean, honest and simple. A fine educational system should concentrate on personality-building, then knowledge-teaching.

The award-winning, Hewlett Foundation-funded OER Research Hub based at The Open University (UK) is pleased to announce its very own School of Open course in collaboration with the Peer 2 Peer University and Creative Commons. It opens for sign-up today at https://p2pu.org/en/courses/2377/open-research/.

Over six months in the making and peer-reviewed by the community, this new School of Open course offers the opportunity to explore the concept and practices of open research with participants from around the world. The course has been designed for any researcher who has an interest in utilizing open techniques and practices in their own research.

Join researchers Bea de los Arcos, Rob Farrow, Beck Pitt, and project manager Natalie Eggleston for this four-week course that explores what open research is and the issues involved around it, including: ethics, dissemination, reflection, and evaluation. The course starts Monday, 15 September 2014 and features its very own “Open Research” badge for course completion and participation.

Sign up for the course here

To sign up, simply click the “Start Course” button on the lower left of the course page once you have signed into or registered for a p2pu.org account. Sign-up will remain open through Friday, 12 September.

About the OER Research Hub

The OER Research Hub is an international open research project examining the impact of open educational resources (OER) on learning and teaching practices. It works collaboratively with initiatives, projects and organisations around the world, disseminating its research and curating evidence for the impact of OER on its Impact Map.

“The research is being carried out by The Open University (UK) in collaboration with School of Open, and is funded by the Hewlett Foundation in order to support future excellence in open education. Your answers will help us build a picture of how people across the world use online resources for learning and teaching. Our research data will help people around the world make more informed decisions about online teaching and learning. The results of this questionnaire will also be used to help improve future School of Open courses.“

The survey is also linked at the end of every stand-alone course so you will be reminded to take it when you complete one of the courses. The survey will remain open through the end of August.

After months of discussions, deliberations and planning between CC staff, African Regional Coordinators, African Affiliate teams and others in the open space, Creative Commons Africa is set to storm Africa by having a continent-wide launch for School of Open in September.

School of Open is a global community of volunteers providing free online courses, face-to-face workshops, and innovative training programs on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age. Through School of Open, you can learn how to add a Creative Commons license to your work, find free resources for classroom use, open up your research, remix a music video, and more!

School of Open programs will be launched in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, and South Africa in September on a series of topics ranging from Creative Commons licensing, intellectual property protection, open society concepts, and the Linux operating system.

Strategic collaborations are underway with the Mozilla Foundation, Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, WikiAfrica, University of Lagos, University of Tanzania, and the Institute of Educational Management Technology of the Open University of Tanzania to make the launch a success.

School of Open Kenya  

School of Open Kenya already started out as a trail blazer by organizing a two-week after school program that introduces high school students to open culture through the use of online School of Open courses and related open educational resources (OER). The training was designed to satisfy the academic needs of the students and to enable the students to use open tools such as Creative Commons licenses to create and share knowledge, as well as learning required subjects in new and creative ways. The students integrated the School of Open training into their school work and were able to produce projects such as this Titration Demo video by the Lenana School under CC BY. Despite its long strides, Jamlab and CC Kenya are not resting their oars; they will be launching a Train the Trainers program this September where they will train 10+ community members to organize and run SOO workshops in more high schools and in neighboring countries. SOO Kenya will also host a SOO Africa launch event and Maker Party entitled PopJam. Jamlab + CC Kenya, in collaboration with Mozilla Kenya and Wikipedia Kenya, will host the event for 5 high schools in the region. Stay tuned for details!

School of Open South Africa  

CC South Africa hosts three projects under the School of Open initiative. The first is the #OpenAfrica project where in conjunction with WikiAfrica, open advocates from Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Malawi, Uganda and Ghana were put through an “open” bootcamp. The month-long camp covered Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Open Street Maps, Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Data, Open Government, and related fundraising and community building skills. Advocates returned equipped with “open” knowledge and skills to their home countries to influence and spur their communities into action. This has resulted in the creation of new CC affiliate teams in Ethiopia and Cote d’Ivoire and the launch of open mandated tech hubs in these communities.

Launching off #OpenAfrica, participants were invited to compete for the first Kumusha Bus stop. The Kumusha Bus is an African adaption of the South American Libre Bus. Ethiopia ‘won’ the first Kumusha Bus stop. The team spent four days inspiring, teaching and sharing at GIZ Headquarters in Addis Ababa. Participants from Sheger Media, AIESEC and Addis Ababa University were in attendance. The four days resulted in the launch of Project Luwi. Luwi is an open source project, aiming to increase the application of open source information and communication technologies (ICT). Luwi intends to create a local community of interested volunteers that is able to foster motivation and creativity around Open Educational Resources (OERs) and supports a culture of sharing information freely in Ethiopia.

The third project is the Creative Commons for Kids program (CC4Kids). CC4Kids was built with Obami, a South Africa-based social learning platform. The course is self-taught and takes about 45 minutes to complete. CC South Africa was invited to teach its first course as part of a Maker Party at the Code for Cape Town project (Code4CT) with 24 grade 10 and 11 girls from the Centre for Science and Technology (COSAT) in Cape Town, South Africa. For three weeks the girls were trained on how the web works and actively participated in building web content. Instead of policing students’ actions, CC4Kids teaches youth how to open and share their creative and educational works legally through the use of CC licenses. All the girls now have simple web pages they created. CC4Kids’ next Maker Party will be held at RLabs in August. Stay tuned!

School of Open Tanzania  

CC Tanzania is planning to host three sets of trainings. The first will be an ICT empowerment training for unemployed youth, the second will focus on teaching persons with disabilities how to use computers, and the third will focus on training educators on using ICT to improve how they teach their students. Participants will become new School of Open volunteers, improving and running future training programs as a way to give back to and grow their community. Development will be led by CC Tanzania volunteers with expertise in law, journalism, and information technology. CC Tanzania will host a joint SOO Africa launch event + Mozilla Maker Party, date and location TBD.

School of Open Nigeria  

CC Nigeria will, in five weekends, train participants on Nigerian copyright law, intellectual property protection, and the Linux operating system. The training will have two tracks: the first track being copyright law and the second being the Linux operating System. Participants will have the opportunity to choose either or both tracks. CC Nigeria also plans to host a joint SOO Africa launch event + Mozilla Maker Party during the training. During the event, experienced web users will train participants on easy ways to creating content using Mozilla tools.

SOO Nigeria links:

• Courses schedule: http://creativecommonsng.org/school-of-open-nigeria/
• SOO Nigeria Launch Event & Maker Party: https://events.webmaker.org/#!/events/4526
• Registration form for all SOO Nigeria activities: http://creativecommonsng.org/school-of-open-nigeria/soo2014/

After the continent-wide launch, participants who attended the courses will have together obtained and built knowledge of open culture, IP protection and ICT skills.

Stay tuned to this blog or sign up for School of Open Announcements to be notified when each program launches in September! Learn more about how you can get involved with the School of Open at http://schoolofopen.org.

About Maker Party

School of Open and Creative Commons is excited to be partnering with Mozilla to celebrate teaching and learning the web with Maker Party. Through thousands of community-run events around the world, Maker Party unites educators, organizations and enthusiastic Internet users of all ages and skill levels.

We share Mozilla’s belief that the web is a global public resource that’s integral to modern life: it shapes how we learn, how we connect and how we communicate. But many of us don’t understand its basic mechanics or what it means to be a citizen of the web. That’s why we’re supporting this global effort to teach web literacy through hands-on learning and making with Maker Party.

About the School of Open

The School of Open is a global community of volunteers focused on providing free education opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, and research. Volunteers develop and run online courses, offline workshops, and real world training programs on topics such as Creative Commons licenses, open educational resources, and sharing creative works. The School of Open is coordinated by Creative Commons and P2PU, a peer learning community for developing and running free online courses.

What is openness? What are the different kinds of openness? Why engage in open activities, and what potential problems or obstacles might there be to doing so? These are some of the questions we’ll discuss in a course called “Why Open?,” at the School of Open from August 10 – September 5, 2014. This is the second iteration of this course, the first having taken place in August 2013.

We are still working on a few details about the course, but you can get a good sense of what we’ll do by visiting the course page. The topics for the four weeks are:

1. What Does Open Mean? During this first week we’ll discuss what we think the various meanings of “open” are, and explore what others have said as well.
2. Open licenses, and “open” vs “free”: During the second week we’ll talk about open licenses (especially Creative Commons licenses) and similarities/differences between what is open and what is free. We’ll also start working on a group project to engage in a particular open practice.
3. Open practices: During the third week we’ll work in small groups on an open practice, chosen by the group, then write a reflection on that experience.
4. Openness: benefits and issues: In the last week we’ll finish off the course by trying to answer the question in the title: Why open? What are the benefits to openness, and what are some of the potential problems involved? How might we address those problems?

Two badges are available for participants:

• A badge for completing the open practice in Week 3.
• A final course badge for completing a portfolio of work in the course along with a final reflection.

We will also host at least two Google Hangouts with guest speakers who have expertise in the topics being discussed for a particular week (maybe three; we’re still finalizing these!), and at least one Twitter chat during the course (more if there is interest!). Participants will mostly be communicating and submitting assignments via Discourse (the tool used to host P2PU community discussion and School of Open community discussion), though we may also work together on some collaborative documents on Hackpad.

Registration is open now! We’d love for you to join us; please pass this information on to anyone you think might be interested!

To join the course, simply click the ‘Start Course’ button on the bottom left of the course page.