AboutUs

About Open.Michigan

= About Us =

Open.Michigan encourages researchers, learners, and instructors to maximize the impact and reach of their scholarly work through open sharing. Open.Michigan helps people find, use, and create openly licensed content and provides a space to share new content. The Open.Michigan Team explores and supports new ways for people to interact with courses, content and curriculum -- with the goal of contributing work that can then be used and remixed by the community.

Open.Michigan represents a growing portfolio of open initiatives and projects at U-M. The Open.Michigan web site is a gateway to a wide spectrum of initiatives at U-M and our collaborating institutions. With a common goal of opening resources for teaching, learning and research for use and enhancement by a global community, these projects increase the value of those resources to U-M and the world. Open.Michigan provides a clear view of the many places and ways U-M contributes to our world's knowledge and creates exemplary resources for education and research.

How We Started
Open.Michigan started as a result of a collaboration between a few faculty, a few administrators, and a few students. After MIT received a round of funding from the Hewlett and Mellon foundations to launch their OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative in 2002, their goal was to publish the entire curriculum within 5 years. While they worked towards this goal, they encouraged other institutions to do the same and shared their resources, insight, and documents in assistance. Collaborators at U-M (faculty, admins) started talking about how to do open courseware here. Some wanted to use the MIT model and get a bunch of funding, others were left wondering if there might be a completely different model, given the size of the curriculum and the associated cost.

In the fall of 2005, School of Information Associate Professor Joseph Hardin and graduate student Carl Collins laid the groundwork for a model that would leverage students as the ones that would work with faculty members to clear and publish course materials. Carl transitioned out of the project and in his place recruited Garin Fons, Pieter Kleymeer, David Hutchful, and Timothy Vollmer to work with Prof. Hardin to see where this could go.

Over the course of the next year this group worked to generate a workflow for clearing course materials of copyright and also designed a software tool that students would not only use to manage the associated course material but also use to communicate with the faculty member, record important metadata about the materials, and prep them for publication. We now call this model: dScribe. It's touted as a scalable model of distributed Open Educational Resource (OER) publishing that promotes and leverages a participatory pedagogy between faculty and students.

Our collaboration on the administrative side comes in the form of working closely with a team of lawyers here at the University to address issues of copyright and other such topics and other administrators and to help spread the word about the value of OER and open sharing on campus and around the world -- be it software, standards, archives, publishing, or educational materials.

Med School, Health Sciences Schools Help Build OER Initiative
In the fall of 2007, the University of Michigan Medical School hired our team of then four students to conduct a pilot with some of the medical school course materials. Since then, we have organized students at the School of Information, U-M Medical School, College of Literature Science and Arts, Education, Nursing, and various other schools to generate OER from course materials. The initiative has been funded in part from the U-M Medical School, U-M Office of the Provost, and the Hewlett Foundation.

Housed in the Med School's Office of Enabling Technologies, our team has been incubating Open.Michigan's initial work while partnering with the other health sciences schools, the School of Information and MLibrary to build Open.Michigan as a full-blown U-M initiative. At the time of this writing in 2012, we have a core team that includes a community outreach coordinator, a project manager for international partnerships, a marketing and publications manager, an operations specialist, a part-time technical developer, and several temp student employees who help facilitate the project. We also have a number of exciting projects in sub-Saharan Africa as well as with organizations like Creative Commons, Open CourseWare Consortium, Peer 2 Peer University, and others.

Looking Ahead
Our ongoing goal: to implement a low cost, scalable, and participatory OER initiative at the University of Michigan and provide tools, resources, and expertise for faculty, staff, and students who wish to create and share open content. Our impact might be best measured in the number of students, faculty, and staff we have worked with who now have a new perspective on creating and sharing content and the impact that Open Educational Resources can have for their own education, and the continuing education of alumni, community members, and self-learners worldwide. Read more about our strategy.