collaborative learning

The Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence provide annual recognition to outstanding individuals, courseware and OpenCourseWare sites in the OCW Consortium community. The awards are presented each year at the global OpenCourseWare Consortium’s annual conference, to be held this year May 8-10 in Bali, Indonesia.

The ACE 2013 winners in the different categories are:

• Landmark Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence: Notre Dame OpenCourseWare (United States).  The University of Notre Dame is one of the founding members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and launched its OCW site in 2006. The site currently has more than 50 courses in 24 subject areas, and in 2012 received visits from 300,000 individuals in 211 countries and territories around the world.
• Outstanding New Site Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya OCW (Spain).  Sharing material from more than 200 courses, the UPC OCW platform is also integrated with different information systems of the university, such as Prisma, Gauss and the library catalogue.
• Technical Innovation Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence: Peer 2 Peer University. The P2PU has been named the recipient of this award for the creation of an e-mail tool called the MOOC Maker, for offering Massive Open Online Courses using OpenCourseWare and other Open Educational Resources. The MOOC Maker has been recently used to structure a course through the MIT Media Lab called Learning Creative Learning, which enrolled 24,000 students.

“These three sites are outstanding examples of the creativity, dedication and generosity that are hallmarks of the OCWC community,” said OCW Consortium Executive Director Mary Lou Forward.  ”We are thrilled to recognize their efforts and help draw attention to their contributions to the global body of open educational resources.”

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 250 higher education institutions and associated organisations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.

The MOOC was taught by renowned expert Alberto Cairo between January and March 2013, as part of the Knight Center’s new MOOC initiative, which began in October last year with the first edition of the infographics course and counted with the participation of 2,000 people from 109 countries.

"As far as we know, this was the first MOOC on journalism in the world," said professor Rosental Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center. "This first MOOC was an experiment and I can now say that it was a big success. We proved the concept and now we are preparing several other MOOCs on journalism topics.”

Professor Alves said that about half of the participants were engaged in the discussion forums. "The fact that 2,214 people interacted in the forums of the course is really a good indicator of the effectiveness of the MOOC," he said.

“People from more than 100 countries have participated in this MOOC. We've had journalists, designers, scientists, economists, statisticians, developers, etc. This fact has made the course much richer and more engaging. It would not have been so interesting if the student body were not so diverse,” wrote instructor Alberto Cairo in his final message to the class.

The Knight Center’s pioneering MOOC programme has been designed especially for this new, massive format and seeks to encourage the largest amount of student-to-student and instructor-to-students interactions as possible. On March 8 the Knight Center launched its first MOOC in Spanish, "How to Improve Electoral Coverage."

On May 16th, Learning experts and pioneers such as Dr. Tony Bates of Tony Bates Associates, Dr. Ignasi Labastida, director of the OCW Consortium and Creative Commons, and António Silva Mendes, Director of Education and Vocational Training at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education and Culture will take part as keynote speakers at LINQ 2013. They will join the already confirmed Prof. Dr. Rory McGreal and Prof. Dr. Fred Mulder, both UNESCO chairs for Open Educational Resources (OER), as well as Christian-Friedrich Lettmayr, Director of the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP). Together these esteemed speakers will establish the greater context of international learning innovations for LINQ 2013.

Complementing the established experts, selected researchers from over 150 submissions will also present new and innovative research papers and projects. Four parallel sessions, divided into three parts each, will provide the structure for presentations. The 1st Parallel Session will consist of invited European speakers as well as two workshops respectively on the co-hosting VOA3R project and the innovative ODS project. The 2nd Parallel Session will consist of the selected papers from the LINQ 2013 call. These papers in turn fit into three thematic sections: “Digital Resources & Online Repositories”, “TEL for Schools, Universities, & Lifelong Learning”, and “Innovations & Future Trends in LET”. In addition, the 3rd and 4th Parallel Sessions will be dedicated to the presentations of selected European and international projects, thematically divided into “Quality Management: Evaluation, Standards & Certification”, “Open Access & Open Educational Resources: Policies, Tools and Content”, and “New Knowledge Networks – Ideas & Innovation for LLL” on the one hand, and “VET, New Skills & Quality”, “Teachers in Focus: Competence & Skill Development”, and “Innovation in TEL” on the other. The final conference programme is available on the LINQ 2013 conference website at www.learning-innovations.eu/2013/programme.

Registration for LINQ 2013 is still available for all interested groups until May 8^th – only a few seats remain, so please register as soon as possible to ensure your chance to participate. Further information on registration is available at the conference website at www.learning-innovations.eu/registration. For the latest updates on LINQ and related initiatives, follow @LINQ_Conference on Twitter and like www.facebook.com/LINQConference on Facebook.