Hello! Like most of the people who will actually read this blog, I have created it to chronicle and share my learning in the MOOC "Introduction to Openness in Education" taught by David Wiley (blog and Twitter) through the Canvas Network.
This course is the fourth "official" MOOC I have enrolled in. I say "enrolled" as I have to admit that I did not finish all of them. Previously I took and completed (received a certificate) the "Power Searching with Google" course. I then started the fall 2012 "Introduction to Genetics and Evolution" course through Coursera, mostly to gain experience with a "popular" MOOC for my work. Unfortunately, I took it solely based on timing and found that it was a more rigorous course than I was anticipating and so I never completed the course. Based on that experience, and wanting to take a course in a subject I was interested in, I am currently in the "Introduction to Astronomy" course, though I have not kept up with the homework for that course either. I am also signed-up for the "Advanced Power Searching with Google" and "Locating, Creating, Licensing and Utilizing OERs (OER-101)," through Open SUNY, both of which start tomorrow!
My day job is working at the University of Minnesota, for the College of Education and Human Development's Academic and Information Technology group as an Assistant Director. While this role may seem well suited to this course, my path into and through higher education is not at all "normal." My undergraduate is in Electrical and Computer Engineering and my masters is in Business Administration with a concentration on Technology Management. After working for only two years in "industry," for Electronic Data Systems (EDS -- now a part of HP's Enterprise Business Services), I started working for Louisiana State University when my partner lander her first professorial job there. I was soon working in their research computing group and finished my time at LSU as the Director of their High Performance Computing (HPC) group. We eventually moved "back" (nearer to) home and I took a job as a Director with the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) as part of the University of Minnesota.
In my roughly 15 years working in research and high performance computing, I was constantly using open source software solutions. In particular, I was a fairly early adopter of Linux, running it as my sole desktop operating system as early as 1997. Given this, I am very familiar with "openness," the reasons people contribute to open projects, and the efficacy of such projects.
In my current job, I have the pleasure of working on special projects. One of these projects was to discover existing open textbooks, create a searchable catalog of them, and to provide a mechanism for these texts to be peer reviewed. This work culminated in our Open Academics Catalog, a project I am proud to have taken part in. Open textbooks and open software have a lot in common, regarding the rationales for creating them and working with them, so that project felt very natural to me.
While working on that project, I was introduced to many people who have been working on projects like these much longer than I. Through them, and through all of the reading and research I was doing on my own for the project, I learned of the now famous artificial intelligence course offered by Stanford University professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. As some of you may know, their success in that course led to the creation of Udacity, which was closely followed by Coursera (also founded by successful MOOCers from Stanford). These two were certainly not the first or only organizations to offer such free access to education (see MIT's Open Courseware, Peer to Peer [P2P] University, Open University, and others). There are many organizations promoting the use of, originally creating, or offering in some way open educational resources (OER). However, they may rightly be viewed as the start of the "MOOC" used in common language. By the way, given my open source background, I have a strong affinity to the Canvas network since they are based on open source software.
I am in this course both for professional development, for my day job, but also for personal growth as I feel invested in the "open" concept more broadly (for software, textbooks, learning, science and research, etc.). I am excited to finally be jumping in and getting caught up and I look forward to working with all of you.
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