I agree that those and other distance ed courses– which is most of what our center does– are suitable (and will form the basis for at least some of our OCW courses), but they aren’t– at least with our distance ed courses– directly ready because all of them presuppose that there is an insructor or at least some kind of grader.

The point of what I am interested in is creating something that provides the same outcomes but without the instructor or grader. But many questions. Such as: how can there be adequate assessment? The traditional model(s) are unavailable, but perhaps there are other ways or other methods that reinforce as much or more, which is where tying to communities of learners (and I don’t just mean other students taking the course, since the odds of many being in the course and in the same place at the same time are negligible) might be useful.

Re. existing courses as independent study experiences, I think a lot of “Distance Education” courses would be well-suited for this, as would a lot of older “independent study” or “correspondence” courses.

Hmm, wouldn’t it be cool to try to buy up a lot of old, “outdated” paper-based independent study courses and re-release them as electronic OCW? I wonder how one could find out about those.

I should note that what I know of the Open Learn stuff comes from browsing around in it. Hopefully Tony’s presentation will be available in some form so I can learn some more.

I’m sorry enough I can’t be there, at the moment!

As Scott mentioned, a big part of the impetus behind the Moodle mod that I’ve worked on is to take a LMS and open up complete are mostly complete courses–activities included–to self-motivated learners. The question then is do the courses fit a model of independent or social learning without the typical instructor-leader role to motivate and structure learning?

I’m definitely paying close attention to the WP and Mediawiki work by the various amigos and have been pointing people to it. But I have deeply mixed feelings, perhaps because, as I was talking about in the post, I feel allegiance to– and in some cases a moral imperative to pursue– some diverse needs.

Primarily, the easy reusability/remixability is a boon for what I am calling professional educators, but I don’t know that it does much in terms of creating a potentially richer experience for independent learners…

Maybe the two areas can’t really meet. Then again, maybe with some plugin finagling and such it would be a realistic option for learners to independently make use of the materials in a structured environment that right now feels like an obstacle.

And I really have no concrete ideas how to proceed in trying to integrate some sense of learning community in these distributed, open, asynchronous “courses” but I do think that open courses and open courseware are not-so-subtly different endeavors (that can work together) and I perhaps and more interested in the former.

If that makes any sense.