School of Open talking points for Universities

[Jane Park]

Hi all,

We are planning a School of Open Africa launch for August/September 2014 and the need arose for some talking points and examples to explain the significance of SOO to more formal institutions, ie. schools and universities. The hope would be to be able to teach SOO course modules as part of an official university course or otherwise incorporate SOO activities into schools.

So far, I know of four SOO projects that have worked with schools/universities in some official capacity:

1) SOO Writing Wikipedia course + University of Mississippi: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/40460. It turned out there was some red tape and they did not end up offering it as part of the official course schedule, but UMiss students were encouraged to take the online course. SOO leads in this case knew a professor at the university, so that was a huge part of the approach AFAIK, but hopefully Pete and Sara can shed more light on this?

2) CC and Wikimedia Argentina's Lila Pagola is teaching a graduate seminar on copyright and she has integrated open licensing module into that. She is a professor at another university, but guest lecturer at the University of Cordoba where the seminar is being taught. This is another example of getting faculty themselves on board first to convince university administration. She and her colleagues will adapt the course and make a version available online under CC BY-SA as part of SOO in the fall. Copying Lila here in case she has anything to add about the approach she took when talking to the university.

3) Copyright 4 Educators Australia. In this case the course facilitators are part of the National Copyright Unit of Australia already, so we just got lucky. They offer educators general professional development credits through NCU I believe. All the deets here: https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/40184

4) SOO Kenya: We also got lucky here because the facilitators (Simeon and Kas) started the program at a high school that was Kas' alma mater -- Precious Blood High School. But since they have expanded to other schools, even in Senegal, so I wonder if Simeon and Kas have thoughts to add as to their approach, beneficial talking points with school administration?

And then there is CC China Mainland's OER Summer Camp and eXtreme Learning Process and CC Romania's OER Awareness for Librarians -- all of which started through their CC affiliate contacts and then became part of SOO later. Still, the methods used in these cases might be valuable for SOO, so copying Liuping, Bogdan, and Valentina here as well.

I also know that Christina and others talk to universities/schools about OER and related topics -- your two cents would also be helpful here!

Anyone else have experience getting SOO into a university or other institution? What hurdles did you run into?

Let's discuss on this thread and aggregate resources at this pad: https://p2pu.hackpad.com/SOO-talking-points-for-Universities-XxjnKlCmAAY. From there we can start drafting a one pager that we can use to push for SOO program development in schools!

Cheers,
Jane

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Jane Park
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[Simeon Oriko]

Hi everyone, 

Sorry to jump on this a little late. 

On explaining the significance of SOO to formal institutions: 

When we ran the SOO Kenya Initiative in high schools, we had two things in mind: 

1. Students at the institutions were already organized in student clubs and associations like Journalism club, Model United Nations club etc. We primarily chose to work with Computer Science clubs as the faculty sort of already 'get it' and most of the students already had basic digital literacy skills. Facilitation is easy when the groups are already organized. 

2. High schools in Kenya are very competitive in almost all aspects - primarily academics. School Principals generally jump at anything they perceive to give their students an edge. 

With these two things in mind, we integrated school work in the SOO training and came up with outputs like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1y5Z4yHmWE. 

In this way, the students were able to achieve two things: learn about OER's and open licensing by creating and sharing knowledge, as well as learn certain concepts in new and creative ways. Both were appreciated by the school administration. 

This is a relatively unexplored concept for high schools in Kenya as most schools do not allow use of technology in their institutions - with the exception of computer classes according to the national syllabus. 

I hope this helps provide some insights on how to incorporate SOO activities into formal institutions. 

Kind Regards, 

Simeon Oriko 

[Jane Park]

This is all very helpful Simeon! in-line,

On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Simeon Oriko <sim...@jamlab.co.ke> wrote:

Hi everyone,

Sorry to jump on this a little late.

On explaining the significance of SOO to formal institutions:

When we ran the SOO Kenya Initiative in high schools, we had two things in mind:

1. Students at the institutions were already organized in student clubs and associations like Journalism club, Model United Nations club etc. We primarily chose to work with Computer Science clubs as the faculty sort of already 'get it’ and most of the students already had basic digital literacy skills. Facilitation is easy when the groups are already organized.

Interesting. So targeting existing student and/or faculty groups that may be more friendly to open culture is one in.

2. High schools in Kenya are very competitive in almost all aspects - primarily academics. School Principals generally jump at anything they perceive to give their students an edge.

Ok, so make sure to have some messaging points about competitive edge, enhancing academic achievement.

With these two things in mind, we integrated school work in the SOO training and came up with outputs like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1y5Z4yHmWE. 

In this way, the students were able to achieve two things: learn about OER’s and open licensing by creating and sharing knowledge, as well as learn certain concepts in new and creative ways. Both were appreciated by the school administration.

Great points.

This is a relatively unexplored concept for high schools in Kenya as most schools do not allow use of technology in their institutions - with the exception of computer classes according to the national syllabus.

I hope this helps provide some insights on how to incorporate SOO activities into formal institutions.

This is great. Will be sure to include these points in the draft. 

Looking forward to hearing others approaches and thoughts!

Kind Regards,

Simeon Oriko

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Simeon Oriko | Co-Founder

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