E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

On the third day of the conference I had to do my own presentation. The title 'Pushing EdX to be Open' I submitted half a year ago, still did the job, the room was filled.

The slides of my presentation are below. As soon as the video is available I will embed the video as well.

NB. The picture of the first slide I haven taken on Tuesday morning in Bryce Canyon National Park.

Video recording

What did people say?

Here I have embedded some tweets about my presentation:

Been looking forward to @wfvanvalkenburg session since the schedule came out - Pushing EdX to be Open #opened13

— Rolin Moe (@RMoeJo) November 8, 2013

http://t.co/nE1sutBBIY They post OER, OA and Open Source software they develop. Hells yes, son, that's how you do it. #opened13

— Sarah Glassmeyer (@sglassmeyer) November 8, 2013

@wfvanvalkenburg disappointed that TU Delft is the only @creativecommons licensed MOOC in edX. Well, this is embarrassing. #opened13

— Lindsey Weeramuni (@LBWicket) November 8, 2013

@cgreen says when negotiating for MOOC creation terms, hold the line and make #openlicensing a requirement. Like @wfvanvalkenburg. #opened13

— Lindsey Weeramuni (@LBWicket) November 8, 2013

I'm pretty sure I just saw @wfvanvalkenburg after his prez drop the mic and walk off the stage. #opened13

— Lindsey Weeramuni (@LBWicket) November 8, 2013

I saw the mic bounce RT @LBWicket: I'm pretty sure I just saw @wfvanvalkenburg after his prez drop the mic and walk off the stage. #opened13

— Richard Tibbles (@richardtibbles) November 8, 2013

This morning David Kernohan did an a-typical keynote. He started of that he couldn't do it and ran away. On the screen we saw him running and that was already part of his documentary. His documentary The Avalanche that Hasn’t Happened gives a critical evaluation of the testing/evaluation narrative in education.

Everyone who is involved with education should watch this video

Resources and citations for the video are available here.

The only critic to it is, that David should know that students don't watch videos that long ;-)

The first keynote of the OpenEd Conference this year was supposed to be delivered by Daphne Koller of Coursera. Because some reason I don't know, we ended up with the other founder of Coursera Andrew Ng via a skype connection. He did a presentation based on the standard slide deck many of us have heard before. Anya Kamenetz did a very good job in writing a report of the keynote. You should definitely check it out.

For me the most important part was that Coursera is not interested in Open Education. In his answer to a question of UNESCO chair Rory McGreal he made it sound that Coursera owns the content and not the universities.

I'm interested to hear what public universities will say about this. Within the Open Education family we have always said that publicly funded education/research should be available to the public. Coursera thinks differently about this.

I'm very glad that my university has decided to join EdX and not Coursera. Let's see what the Dutch Universities of Leiden, Amsterdam and Eindhoven have to say about this next week at the Onderwijsdagen.

At the OpenEd Conference Kathi Fletcher presented a new open-source editor for creating textbooks that are immediately available on the web, in epub format and pdf. This project is done with the OERPUB project.

With the development they kept as close to their principles as possible:

• as much like word/gdocs as possible
• support attribution
• born accessible (Images, tables, mathematics)
• Mathematics editing support
• drag and drop examples, exercises, notes
• Support collaboration

The presentation was really good and it certainly has attracted my attention. Let see if we can start a project at TU Delft with it.

More information in her slides: