Vital, a joint Open University / e-Skills project addressing teachers' CPD needs funded by the DCSF are inviting contributions of CPD resources for a new Open Course Movement initiative.
Built on open source platforms Moodle and Drupal, the Vital site provides a range of online CPD materials related to the use of technology in schools as well as acting as a hub for other training providers. Project director Peter Twining describes the Open Course Movement as being "to course materials what the Open Source Movement is to software." He says,
The OCM aims to enable ICT CPD providers (and others) to collaborate on the development of course materials which will be available on a Creative Commons licence. The benefits of this will be:
- reduced development costs for individual ICT CPD providers
- enhanced quality of course provision through the pooling of expertise and staff time in developing the materials
- greater consistency of ICT CPD provision across the country
- greater pool of high quality ICT CPD resources available for everyone to use (on a Creative Commons licence)
This sounds like a great opportunity for teachers and others in the open source community to work together to develop Moodle courses to share their insights and experiences of technology in education, either focussing on the use of particular applications to support or extend learning, or addressing broader issues.
The immediate focus is on the CPD that will be necessary for primary school teachers implementing Sir Jim Rose's recommendations for the new primary curriculum, expected for September 2011, which advocates embedding ICT across the whole of the primary curriculum, with ICT taking its place at the core, as an 'essential for learning and life'.
The OU's own Moodle wiki module is being used to plan the development of these, the initial wish list is
- Twitter in the classroom
- Using games in the classroom
- Games hardware in the classroom
- Serious games in the classroom
- Sharing documents on line
- Apps – what they are, what different ones are available for different platforms
- Developing knowledge age skills using Virtual Worlds (Secondary)
- Learning to learn by teaching a robot
- Problem solving using Scratch
- Getting creative across the curriculum with digital video
- Open course development within the Vital infrastructure
But plenty more could be added on here if folks are up for it.
You'll probably need to register to access some of the above links, but this is free.
Of course this is not particularly a new idea. There is Curriki.org and one of the reasons for setting up the INGOTs about 5 years ago was to generate a revenue to sustain free on-line content, involve learners in contributing to it and integratig CPD through assessment for learning. There is also Gary Clawson's National Database Initiative. Personally, I think that this sort of project has to be international to be sustainable. It's simple statistics. Wikipedia, Facebook, You Tube, Twitter etc are all international and general, lending themselves to wide global input. So I would say that Open CPD will struggle if it is focused on a narrow English curriculum perspective, and what happens when the project funding runs out? OTOH having several approaches that can copy resources between them has benefit since if one is successful it can draw from the others.