Congratulations to the organizers and participants of the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology, which took place on March 29th. This was unquestionably one of the best meetings that I have attended, featuring an incredible and inspirational keynote presentation by Lawrence Lessig and dozens of hands-on presentations by faculty, administrators, and students about how they are using technology to improve teaching and learning at Penn State.

It is worth visiting the Symposium Site to access notes on individual sessions, blog posts, and other products generated during and leading-up to the meeting. In fact, I do not believe that I have ever participated in a better documented meeting! Kudos to the participants.

Once again, congratulations and thank you to the symposium organizers, our friends at Penn State Education Technology Services, and sponsors from the Terra Incognita Team! We are already looking forward to next year’s Symposium!

Well it is always fun to announce new things and it seems somehow fitting that on Labor Day weekend we’re beginning to accept applications for the new online master of professional studies in human resources and employment relations (HRER). Courses will begin in summer 2008, and this degree will allow busy HRER professionals to stay employed and balance life commitments while earning an education that can advance their careers.

This master’s degree is designed to meet the growing challenges of hiring and retaining talented employees, managing complex benefit plans, and staying up-to-date with labor laws and employment-relations trends. The courses highlight the changing nature of the HRER field, including the impact of the globalization of private and public organizations and the growing importance of diversity in the workforce.

I applaud Paul Clark and his team from Penn State’s Labor Studies and Employment Relations Department for taking advantage of the benefits of online learning by reducing access barriers and creating a program that is extremely beneficial to the profession and meeting the needs of a growing HRER workforce.

What I think is potentially interesting about this program is that the Labor Studies and Employment Relations Department has a standing commitment to study aboard and an understating that HRER and labor relations are global areas of study and practice. Is there an opportunity to use online learning as a way to reduce the barriers for international experiences?

If you have any thoughts or questions relating to this program or the potential of online learning in this area, please feel free to comment!!

Sometimes it seems that a project is just perfect, tying together elements that are mutually reinforcing, interesting, and relevant. The World Campus is contributing to the Commonwealth Computer Navigator’s Certificate (CCNC), which is a project dedicated to creating open courseware that is designed to help learners develop computer competencies using open source software. The project is building from the OpenICDL project, which is an open computer competency certification. The CCNC-added value is that the curriculum and modules will be specifically designed for distance and eLearning delivery.

World Campus learning designers will be working with colleagues in more than 7 countries to refine the pedagogical template used across the curriculum and assume responsibility for one of the certificate modules, while also contributing across the curriculum. I am excited about this project because it is breaking ground in open educational resources (OER) and open source software (OSS), which are two major global trends that hold significant promise for lowering barriers to education, particularly for eLearning. In addition, it provides us the opportunity to work collaboratively with a truly global consortium of colleagues, which will be organizationally enriching.

It is very much my hope that after the basic computer competency curriculum is developed, we will start taking leadership in developing educational materials supporting more advanced competencies related to OSS, such as evaluating OSS software/projects using appropriate metrics, contributing to community development, establishing and growing open source projects and communities, open licensing, etc. And while there currently are materials being produced as stand-alone primers (just Google it), organizations that concentrate on specific OSS topics such as the Open Business Readiness Rating (BRR) project with OSS evaluation, and academic programs (e.g., Carnegie Mellon West, MS program in Software Management) that are integrating OSS topics into their course offerings, pulling a curriculum together as open courseware designed globally would be something very special.

The CCNC is an open project. We would gladly work with enthusiastic designers, graphic artists, and other folks interested in an easy way to contribute.

Any thoughts? Please feel free to share them.
PS: More of Open Source Software as we kick off the “Impact of OSS in Education” series on March 12 for our first posting on Terra Incognita.

How can or should eLearning programs participate in the growing Open Courseware (OCW) or Open Educational Resources (OER) movement? I think that this is an important question and we are now getting some guidance. A recent update on the Internet Discussion forum on Open Educational Resources, which focused on an OECD study, starts to frame a dialog that can help academics and other program leaders decide if they want to contribute and how they might do so effectively.

From the perspective of the World Campus we might ask about how we can support the Penn State community that has interest in OCW/OER and take leadership in the larger international free content movement. The World Campus is in an interesting position, which is not at all unique relative to other online programs. We touch a lot of online courses and programs at early stages of development and throughout the course design and development process. Can we leverage our involvement in course design and development to make material more OCW/OER friendly? In addition, we are viewed as potential innovators and leaders on OCW/OER by colleagues at our peer organizations in higher education, at NGOs, and other related international organizations. Can we more effectively partner with those peer institutions to develop capacity and share practice?

The answer is yes. There must be design and development decisions that promote the usefulness of content as open educational resources, and there are a number of communities in which we can participate.

The World Campus program management team engages early with academic leaders who want to develop and deliver online programs for learners studying at a distance. Program managers along with marketers, learning designers, and other professionals work with faculty and academic administrators throughout the Penn State community to help ensure that the online program will meet expectations and be sustainable. During the process, we could ask if the academic unit would like to make the whole program, individual courses, or parts of courses available as open educational resources through an open courseware initiative. If so, we could approach design and development to include dialog of what would make the materials most useful to prospective adopters.

For example we could proactively help ensure through design and development that the materials support pedagogical intent while also being friendly for editing and reuse; cataloging, searching, and retrieval; aggregation and desegregation; internationalization and localization, accessibility, ease of access in low bandwidth environments, etc. We could work together to help ensure that the content is “free” by helping to:

• Identify file formats are open to ensure easy modification
• Select licenses that promote wide distribution
• Avoid third party materials that are licensed under restrictive terms
• Tag and package content in ways that enhance portability
• Design content at appropriate levels of granularity

In this way a more or less centralized online program could help academic units and faculty members maximize the value of the content that they want to license and distribute as open educational resources through design and development.

So…

• Does anybody know of any centralized online learning design and development shops that are supporting their production units in this way?
• If you are a faculty member, academic administrator, or somebody with an opinion out there, would this be helpful?

The Natural Resources Distance Learning Consortium is one of the first collaborative programs that I was introduced to at Penn State.  I am incredibly excited about our involvement in this consortium because it so clearly illustrates one of the roles that online learning plays in achieving the modern land grant mission.

From my perspective, the Natural Resources Distance Learning Consortium is not only an opportunity to work with a number of great universities, but also an opportunity to illustrate the coherence within the World Campus family of programs. Our program offerings include Community & Economic Development, GIS, Turfgrass Management, and Weather Forecasting as they all support professionals working in the areas of natural resources.

Congratulations and thanks to the team who manages the Penn State World Campus offerings, and to our friends at the Virginia Tech Institute for Distance & Distributed Learning who develop and manage the new web site.

The World Campus Student Fund was born in May of 2004 out of the frustration of seeing distance education students struggling to pay for their courses. So many World Campus students are unable to meet the distance education requirements necessary for federal financial aid and some are simply ineligible because of the course type or number of credits. Most students are adults with families experiencing those things all adults must face - job loss, family illness, divorce and more. These life events often put an unbearable strain on family finances and sometimes students cannot continue pursuing their academic goals. The World Campus Student Fund makes a difference for them.

What is remarkable about the Student Fund is that it is entirely supported by World Campus faculty and staff. To date, over $10,000 in scholarships have been awarded to deserving students. The World Campus has such a generous, caring group of people who have seen the Student Fund as an opportunity to help our own students. We have had 100% participation in the Student Fund, whether it is through payroll deduction, making a one-time contribution, or buying a book at the book sale. The World Campus Student Fund is run by a dedicated group of volunteers.

To the Kentucky student who lost his job and thought he would have to drop out, to the single Pennsylvania mother with small children who thought finishing her degree was beyond her means, and to the disabled student in rural Maine who thought she could never earn a college degree, the World Campus Student Fund has made all the difference.