SOO logo on Holiday Wreath by Kelly Teague under CC BY-SA

This year, our community:

• Gave School of Open a facelift
• Established a community blog
• Tried out a new community discussion forum called Discourse
• Developed and ran online courses on Why Open?, Open Research, Copyright 4 Educators, Creative Commons for K-12 Educators, Writing Wikipedia Articles, ABC of Copyright for Librarians in Latin America, and more
• Launched School of Open Africa with nine programs in four countries
• Ran a second Open Educational Resources (OER) Summer Camp on Luxi Island in China
• Celebrated the Web We Want through a day of awareness, learning and practice for open licensing and its relationship to free culture in Colombia
• Hosted Maker Parties across Africa and combined CC and Mozilla communities to further open education work at Mozfest
• Teamed up with Wikipedians to bolster articles about all things related to open education
• Launched a series of OER awareness workshops for librarians and academics in Romania
• Developed Creative Commons for Kids in South Africa
• Activated the next generation of open advocates in Africa through the Kumusha bus
• All the while bolstering each other up in our meta-community full of beautiful faces

For 2015: Some changes are on the horizon. Mainly, we’ll be working to revamp our website to better support our volunteers wherever they are based, streamline the process for volunteers who want to run their own online courses, and re-strategize around what it means to develop and run a School of Open program. Above all, we want to increase our impact by combining forces with all open web and education advocates who are being leaders in their regions. Stay tuned…

On behalf of our intersecting communities, CC wishes you a wonderful holiday and a Happy New Year!

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See how far we’ve come:

• What we did in 2013
• Highlights from the Class of 2012

SOO logo here. Earth CC BY by Erin Standley, Noun Project.

Our Creative Commons and School of Open volunteers in Kenya, including CC Regional Coordinator Alex Gakuru, are hosting a formal launch event of School of Open Africa in celebration of the School of Open programs launched last month in Africa, and to announce new programs in higher education. The event will feature a panel discussion with senior government officials from the Kenyan Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and Ministry of ICT along with Dr. Bitange Ndemo (University of Nairobi) and regional representatives from UNESCO and Google regarding the status of open education in Africa, School of Open’s contributions and future. Alex says,

“This event will help establish a conversation platform for policymakers around School of Open Africa, connecting and synchronising education and ICT policies with the innovative open education programs being led by Creative Commons volunteers in Africa. It will also connect current School of Open programs in primary and high school education to academia and NRENs¹ — towards the realisation of the international aspiration for universal access to education.”

Additional attendees include professors from local universities and law schools; participants of the copyright law course, CopyrightX:Kenya, who will be awarded certificates of completion; our CC Kenya affiliates; and School Open Kenya leads.

CopyrightX Kenya / CC Kenya / CC BY

In addition to the panel, SOO Kenya’s Simeon Oriko will present on School of Open Africa programs led to date, and Dr. Tonny Omwansa with C4DLab at the University of Nairobi will announce a new School of Open program to develop OER courses for higher education. This program will serve as a model for other universities across Africa to develop high quality open educational resources for use in higher education under CC BY. In celebration, CC t-shirts in Kiswahili will be distributed, “mwananchi mbunifu,” aka ‘creative commoner.’

The event is hosted at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi and will last from 9am-1pm, followed by a celebratory lunch. The event and new OER program in higher education is made possible with technical support from UNESCO and generous financial support from the Hewlett Foundation.

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!

You can access the full comments at http://schoolofopen.p2pu.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/P2PUSchoolofOpenNNReplyComments.pdf. It should be available on the FCC site soon. Here is the Executive Summary:

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) and the School of Open leverage the Internet and open educational resources (OER) to create an innovative, peer-based learning model that anyone in the world can use, with or without an institution. The FCC’s proposal would undercut the efforts of P2PU and related organizations by relegating them to the “slow lane” on the Internet, discouraging millions of would-be learners from pursuing further education to improve their careers and local economies. Research conducted on these learning models would also be hampered, slowing progress and the growth of services that depend on efficient access to resources.

We therefore agree with the comments of the startup community, investors, nonprofits, and millions of Americans calling for rules against unreasonable discrimination and access fees under Title II, and we disagree with the comments by AT&T, Verizon, Comcast in favor of the Chairman’s fast-lane proposal.

Thanks to volunteer Lila Bailey for helping us file!

(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.

“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.

New Web Space

We have a new web space! Previously, communications about our major projects have been scattered throughout the blogosphere and various wiki, Lernanta, and WordPress pages. But today we are happy to announce that there is one place you can visit to learn about and get involved with the School of Open, including newbies who just want to find a course to take.

Our web address hasn’t changed; it’s still http://schoolofopen.org. We invite any and all feedback at our new discussion space.

New Courses

After wrapping our first round of facilitated courses on copyright, Creative Commons, and Wikipedia earlier this year, we continued to develop courses for independent or group study. Here are the ones we recently launched, including a collaboration with Mozilla’s Webmaker initiative!

(Check out all of our stand-alone courses regardless of when they launched.)

→ How to use Open Educational Resources (OER)

Developed by Boyoung Chae and co. over at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC), this course was initially designed to help onboard community college faculty and staff with the CC BY-licensed textbooks coming out of WA’s Open Course Library project. We’ve since worked with them to adapt the course for the general public!

The self-paced modules walk you through how to incorporate open educational resources into your teaching practice, in addition to using open licenses and locating existing OER. One past participant said,

“How to Use OER is a great introduction to this amazing development in education. This will establish a good foundation for understanding the various components of open resources or fill in gaps that you might have. I am grateful the course will remain open after completion so that the materials and discussions can be revisited.”

→ ABC of Copyright for Librarians in Latin America

This Spanish language course seeks to help librarians and library users strengthen their knowledge of copyright laws in Latin America and the challenges that exist to access to information in the 21st century. CC affiliates from Colombia, El Salvador and Uruguay, in collaboration with the Karisma Foundation, developed this course in response to increasingly restrictive copyright laws in Latin America and around the globe. The course contains examples, analysis and open models based on Latin American cases and legislation. Read more about the course launch here.

→ Mozilla Webmaker Training for Teachers (and other web users)

Mozilla Webmaker is all about transforming web users into web makers, aka citizens of the web who do more than just consume content, but also create it while leveraging open resources and tools. The new Mozilla Webmaker Training for Teachers embeds knowledge about open throughout its set of self-paced modules that will help you to:

• “Integrate the mechanics, culture and citizenship of the web into your practice.”
• “Bring creativity to your teaching through open, participatory methods.”
• “Connect with fellow mentors and educators (especially those in your local area) to share knowledge and resources.”

New Survey

In collaboration with the OER Research Hub, we’ve been conducting research on the impact of School of Open courses. As part of this project, we invite you to participate in a survey we created for participants of stand-alone courses.

If you haven’t taken a course yet but plan to, the survey is linked at the end of every stand-alone course so you can take it when you do complete it. The survey will remain open through the end of August. If you have ever gone through a School of Open course on your own, please:

New Plans for a School of Open Africa

Volunteers in Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Nigeria are planning for a School of Open Africa launch in September. Each region will develop and run a training program or course on the use and application of open resources. Stay tuned for a guest post detailing plans, and check out the current programs running in Kenya and South Africa for now:

→ School of Open Kenya Initiative
→ Creative Commons for Kids (South Africa)
→ Activate Africa (South Africa)

Interested in any of the above activities? Get Involved.

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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.

ABC of Copyright for Librarians in Latin America, or ABC del derecho de autor para bibliotecarios de América Latina, is a free, online course that launches today as part of the School of Open.

This Spanish language course seeks to help librarians and library users strengthen their knowledge of copyright laws in Latin America and the challenges that exist to access to information in the 21st century. To learn other languages check out this online english tuition center where you can Find a good English tutor in Singapore.

From the launch announcement:

Public library seeks to provide equal opportunities in access to information, knowledge, recreation, culture, education, reading and writing for all their users. However, there are currently no minimum guarantees that allow libraries and archives carrying out activities related to their mission such as lending books or changing the format of a film (e.g. VHS to digital) for preservation purposes. For decades, protections for authors and/or rightsholders have been increased, while the guarantees of access and inclusion of copyright balances are at the mercy of political will.
…
This imbalance occurs especially in developing countries, as many developed countries have already generated standards seeking to better balance copyright.

To address these challenges, CC affiliates from Colombia, El Salvador and Uruguay, in collaboration with the Karisma Foundation, have developed a course for librarians, archivists, educators, university researchers, and anyone else in the Latin American region interested in these issues. ABC of copyright for librarians in Latin America is designed to strengthen the understanding of basic copyright concepts through examples, analysis and open models based on Latin American cases and legislation.

The course officially launches online on Internet Activa at 5pm Colombia time today (UTC-5). You can join the launch by filling out this form expressing your intent; however, registration to participate in the course is not required.

The course is also available as part of the School of Open as a self-paced course that can be taken at any time, licensed CC BY.

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.