iBerry

Although a truly Open Global Education Network (OGEN) is not yet a reality, it is useful in clarifying aims and objectives to consider what exists of its beginnings in the present and what the future could or should bring. At present, the 'Open Global Education' part of OGEN is mainly represented by Open Courseware (OCW) and, no doubt, this is a good foundation. Certainly, the popularity of today's OCW, in spite of its shortcomings, points to a huge global demand for inexpensive Higher Education by many people with different needs, expectations and backgrounds. Other desirable parts of the educational process such as expert tuition, interaction among students or learning assessment are not nearly so well supported by any sort of infrastructure that could be called open, or free of the usual geographical and political constraints imposed by current systems of Higher Education.

The 'Network' part seems the weakest bit of OGEN at the present time. Nodes, such as university OCW websites, often hyperlink from their courseware to other nodes (websites) but usually only to

I have always been interested in following OCW initiatives of one type or another (many can be found here). They range from small sites, like iBerry, to huge university repositories such as MIT OpenCourseWare or the UK's Open University. For the most part, these large sites make available courseware that was created for funded students by paid academics. Non-paying remote learners are inevitably left on their own as far as important parts of the educational process are concerned, such as expert tuition, assessment or interaction with fellow students. Sometimes an attempt is made to involve OCW users, by providing a discussion forum but in my experience these forums are frequently empty or peppered with plaintive but unanswered pleas for basic assistance.

Recently, some

Several interesting conversations via blogs and email have raised a number of issues. The first concerns the identity of the iBerry 'team'. I hadn't thought our identity (authority?) really mattered too much since with iBerry, what you see is very much what you get but I've had to point out that we really do have very little in the way of an organized team of 'known' people. Apart from myself, a retired UK academic, there's Marielle, a psycholinguist, ( widged.com, now in New Zealand and who kindly hosts iBerry for free) but otherwise we simply rely on anyone who cares to contribute in one way or another - and whenever.

As far as the community

As time passes and yet more universities and colleges jump onto the OCW bandwagon I see a far greater variation in the OCW on offer. MIT has always offered material that ranges from very sketchy 'highlights' to superlative videoed presentations with comprehensive notes and fully-documented assignments but now some HE institutions are really plumbing the depths with thinly disguised advertising comprising little more than course descriptions and topic lists. (In some cases I've even found no tangible OCW at all!) Because OCW is offered without charge I think there has been a tendency among users to be less than critical but OCW has been a great success story in terms of promoting these institutions, otherwise would they continue to encourage the co-operation of their hard-pressed academic staff? I think the time has come to

Please enjoy whatever celebrations the end of the year may bring !

We also wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year.

This is also a good time for one and all to think about the future of iBerry and we would very much like to hear from you, particularly if you are a frequent user of this site. Our main concern at present is

We are uncertain about how to deploy our limited resources and would welcome more feedback from users. Do people find that Google is perfectly satisfactory for searching for OCW or HE information? We try to select useful open courseware so that you can find non-trivial learning material such as full lecture notes or videoed lectures from which you can immediately benefit. On the other hand, typing something like "courseware" into a popular search engine produces

The final push is over so now we say goodbye to iberry-Beta, the final development stage of a content management system (Drupal) that has allowed iberry.com to be upgraded with database functionality. It has taken us over a year to get this far but the benefits are real and should significantly ease further innovation.

To a large extent further innovation is

So now after a final push we will be moving from 'iberry-Beta' to iberry.com again. In comparison with the 'old' iberry.com we now have the benefits of our new Open Source content management system, Drupal, providing improved facilities for finding Open Courseware (OCW) items under multiple categories and also the ability to comment. Perhaps it should be made clearer that anyone is free to comment on anything; e.g. just 'post new comment' after clicking on the title of an OCW item. Your comment will appear immediately if you are registered and if not, it is likely to appear within a few hours (unless you are a spammer!). I hope more people will add comments, particularly for OCW items as they can become quickly outdated, or even broken before the facilitators have had the time to update.

The facilitators continue to ......

The subject portholes have been created and one or two people have already made some contributions. Exactly how the subject portholes are likely to be used, or should be used, is very much a matter of conjecture at present and we will be looking to our members for guidance on this.

We are beginning to see our way towards ......

Now, with around 70 members, we are seeing a significant upsurge of activity. Facilities have been improved for recording profile information and for communication among members so unless you joined very recently please login again sometime soon.

The Open Courseware Directory provides ......