IAM Open Courseware project team initiated and held a discussion with the teachers of the Interactive Media (IAM) course at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) on the 23rd of March, 2009. The aim of this discussion was to gain insights about the teachers’ opinion on the IAM Open Courseware project and to have lunch together in an informal environment.
During the discussion several topics such like intellectual property, copyrights, as well as the internal HvA structure, were raised. HvA teachers were asked to answer some questions about IAM Open Courseware, discuss about the benefits they would gain from joining the platform. We prepared some key questions and main points we wanted to emphasize in advance, as well as visual material was introduced and demonstrated for the participants during the meeting. Besides, we posted several discussion topics on https://oc2009.hva.nl/, in order to receive both positive and negative comments, to invoke interest or resistance, and thus, to contribute to the feedback we get.

More detailed report of the discussion with teachers can be found here.

Yesterday (on 16th of April) IAM Open Courseware team had a brainstorm session together with Margreet Riphagen and Paul den Hertog about the functional design of the IAM Open Courseware website. The outcome of this brainstorm will be a detailed functional design document dedicated to technical people who will be able to do the technical part of the project.

We listed down quite a lot of keywords of the functions which we thought should be included in the back-end and front-end of the website. We decided that teachers (content creators) will have their profiles and will be able to upload (max 10 items at one time), view, change, update, download course materials in different formats. Besides, we have 2 options for metadata to choose from: LOM (Learning object metadata) or Dublin Core. Apart from default Creative Commons license teachers will have a possibility to choose other cc license to protect their copyrights. Moreover, we all agreed that “search” and “advance search” functions will be essential for both learners (users) and teachers (content creators), therefore it is necessary to implement a good tagging system.

More detailed functions will follow.

Last Wednesday (15th of April), Paul Keller from Kennisland, gave a presentation about Creative Commons licensing. This lecture was an initiative from the IAM Open Courseware team to inform teachers and students about copyrights.

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”

This presentation was streamed and is accessible from here.

The 5th HvA Education Conference organized by Hogeschool van Amsterdam was held on the 2nd of April 2009 in the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam. The conference started with an informal lunch meetings where ~800 participants were taking part. Most of the attendees were HvA employees, teachers, professors, scholars, as well as the Institute of Network Cultures and students from the MediaLAB Amsterdam.
The opening speech by Dymph van den Boom, a member of the Board of Directors, was followed by the two interesting keynote speakers: Trude Maas and René Jansen. They talked about community building and networking.

In the afternoon all the participants gathered in small groups to have roundtable discussions about the variety important topics on education and research. The roundtables were arranged into 8 main themes: Learning Community, ICT and Education, Learning the Big City, Young Teachers / Professionalizing, Excellency / Masters, Divergent Perspectives, Study Success, Environment Awareness.

Our IAM OCW team attended the conference and we led the roundtable discussion in the Learning Community about IAM Open Courseware. Rochus did a little introduction about OCW at MIT and TU Delft, and then Daphne started with the first statement about copyright: ‘All material made by teachers is paid for by the school so they should give out their material for free’.

Reactions were diverse. A good argument was that a lot of the teachers make materials in their free time so in theory the statement isn’t true. But on the other hand, IAM OCW could save time on the long run. The main goal of IAM OCW is that we should work together to achieve an open environment where everybody will share and improve educational materials.
The second statement was: ‘By using IAM Open Courseware teachers benefit and students have more guidance.‘
The reactions here were quite positive. We decided to use this statement because we want to convince teachers that they will benefit from IAM OCW and in the teachers lunch this was quite hard to do. The reactions at the discussion table were very useful. We got a lot of tips for platform and what to think of when making an environment.

The conclusion of the afternoon was that IAM OCW is a very good initiative and if similar projects keep popping up so the HvA will notice that it is an important step forward to become a learning community, which was the theme of the conference as well. It was a very fruitful day where we have made more contacts with people who know more about OCW and are willing to help.

You can find the report of the roundtable discussion here.