MIT OpenCourseWare

By joe lombardo on 28 Aug 2003 at 13:16 UTC

MIT is moving forward with there OpenCourseWare initiative. They are putting course materials for hundreds of their classes online for free and open use. The caveat, online participants will miss the classroom discussions and won't earn a degree.

I latched on to the following excerpt from a recent article in Wired magazine.

Ultimately, MIT officials know, OpenCourseWare's success depends on the emergence of online communities to support individual courses. Margulies says MIT is eager to find third parties to create tools that would enable learners or educators to easily organize and manage discussion groups using OpenCourseWare content. "We'd like to see self-managed OpenCourseWare communities," says Margulies. "Our vision is to have this open source software on the site, as well as information that helps people build a learning community, whether it's in Namibia, Thailand, wherever."

Isn't Drupal uniquely suited to provide exactly this kind of community building? The requirements sound similar to those for the Dean for President drupal network.

What do you think? Where does drupal fall short? What are some of Drupal's unique strengths that can be applied?

If there is a general agreement that Drupal is a good match, I'd be happy to work out a 'pitch' to send to MIT's OpenCourseWare leaders.

Comments

me too

moshe weitzman commented 28 August 2003 at 23:00

i'd be happy to pitch to MIT if you can get an audience. i live right down the road.

Is Drupal a Good Match?

cel4145 commented 29 August 2003 at 04:01

Definitely a good idea, but to decide for sure, someone would have to analyze the Open Knowledge Initiative specifications. Then, you'd have to build a presentation describing how Drupal would implement it. Or at least, that's what the MIT OCW FAQ would suggest.

Thanks for the research ;-)

joe lombardo commented 29 August 2003 at 15:20

This is good stuff. After a quick look at the working specs http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=69345&release_id=177635, it seems close but would require some new modules.

I can set up a simple drupal site leveraging the book.module and the project.module to facilitate the creation of a pitch, but I think we'll need more interest than me and Moshe before I take that step.

There appears to be a lot of good thinking in these specs and it might help the overall drupal project if we incorporate some of their concepts.

In the meantime, I'll keep an eye on this thread to gauge interest.
- Joe

Joe Lombardo | joe@familytimes.com | FamilyTimes Online Journals

Interested

tlodge commented 3 September 2003 at 09:43

It looks as though this would be an extremely worthwhile project. I would be interested in getting involved - I am a research assistant at Queen Mary, University of London's Open & Distance Learning unit, and have been working with Drupal for sometime.

I'm convinced that Drupal provides much of what might be required. Haven't looked in detail at the OKI specs, but intend to do so shortly....