Creative Commons Announces “School of Open” with Courses to Focus on Digital Openness

Just in time to cel­e­brate Open Edu­ca­tion Week, here comes a new ini­tia­tive, the School of Open, a learn­ing envi­ron­ment focused on increas­ing our under­stand­ing of “open­ness” and the ben­e­fits it brings to cre­ativ­i­ty and edu­ca­tion in the dig­i­tal age.

Devel­oped by the col­lab­o­ra­tive edu­ca­tion plat­form Peer to Peer Uni­ver­si­ty (P2PU) with orga­ni­za­tion­al sup­port from Cre­ative Com­mons, the School of Open aims to spread under­stand­ing of the pow­er of this brave new world through free online class­es.

We hear about it all the time: Uni­ver­sal access to research, edu­ca­tion and culture—all good things, with­out a doubt—made pos­si­ble by things like open source soft­ware, open edu­ca­tion­al resources and the like.

But what are these var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved?

School of Open has rolled the con­ver­sa­tion back to square one so that under­stand­ing the basics is easy. Through a list of new cours­es cre­at­ed by users and experts, peo­ple can learn more about what “open­ness” means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone cours­es on copy­right, writ­ing for Wikipedia, the col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment of open sci­ence, and the process behind mak­ing open video.

These free cours­es start March 18 (sign up by click­ing the “start course” but­ton by Sun­day, March 17):

These free cours­es are open for you to take at any time:

The approach at P2PU encour­ages peo­ple to work togeth­er, assess one another’s work, and pro­vide con­struc­tive feed­back. It’s a great place to learn how to design your own course, because the design process is bro­ken down step-by-step, and course con­tent is vet­ted by users and P2PU staff. The tuto­r­i­al shows you how the process works.

P2PU is also a place to learn more about what is open con­tent and what is not. Par­tic­i­pants in the ongo­ing course Open Detec­tive learn to iden­ti­fy open source media and then demon­strate mas­tery by mak­ing some­thing of their own using only open con­tent. What if you’re real­ly, real­ly proud of the resource you cre­ate in Open Detec­tive? Take it to the next lev­el and get a Cre­ative Com­mons license to make your work avail­able with­out giv­ing up full copy­right. You guessed it, there’s a course for that too.

Open Edu­ca­tion Week is in full swing (through Mon­day the 18th). There’s a full sched­ule of webi­na­rs to check out, includ­ing dis­cus­sions about the impli­ca­tions of open access for polit­i­cal struc­tures like the World Bank, and the impact of open, glob­al teach­ing in Syr­ia.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Total Noob to Learn­ing Online? P2PU’s Peer-to-Peer Cours­es Hold Your Hand

700 Free Online Cours­es

A Meta List of MOOCs

What Entered the Pub­lic Domain in 2013? Zip, Nada, Zilch!

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site at .


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Comments (3)
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  • Excel­lent and admirable project!
    Just a pity that some­one decid­ed to noun an adjec­tive.

  • Teddy Spaghetti says:

    @M.R. Stringer. Pos­si­bly, instead of “noun­ing an adjec­tive” mod­i­fy­ing the prepo­si­tion would have been bet­ter: “School is Open” would be my sug­ges­tion. How­ev­er, like School of Dance or School of Rock, I believe the verb form is the one in the smithy’s forge. Now that the deci­sion has been made to leave the door unlocked for the open-course era, par­tic­i­pa­tion is, more than ever, depen­dent only on the indi­vid­ual verb­ing the door. Either way, School of Expen­sive con­tin­ues to be both open, and closed.

  • Freddy Fettuccini says:

    @Freddy @M.R. Inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion. I agree with Ted­dy. I believe they were “noun­ing” the verb form of open, which is exact­ly the oppo­site of what M.R. did to the noun, Noun… Isn’t the way we can play with our lan­guage tons of fun?

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