OpenCourseWare Consortium Conferences

A break-out session to review the OCWC Draft Business Plan, relative to Proposed Goal III

• tag discussion ocwc09Goal3

Notes:

Communities need facilitation
- Looking at success stories (for example Spain OCW) we can identify strong leadership and significant amount of support and facilitation to increase networking and collaborating

Connect people with resources they need and with other people
- Active facilitation!
- “Make more friends”
- “We share OCW with the world, but don't share know-how with each other”

Make sure the community knows more about what is going on
- Newsletter (many people don't know about it, check that everyone gets it, make it more interesting, “monthly is fine, not weekly”)
- Facilitate sharing of news from all the institutions

Support twinning between institutions from developed and developing countries
- Help match-make, and attract funds

Facilitate smaller groups within the consortium (discipline specific, regional, etc.)
- Find out what they need, and try to provide it
- Identify communities that are not participating very much (French) and find out why

Make it easy to communicate with the consortium
- More information about staff / who to contact / on the website

Avoid perception of being an inner-circle, look outwards, with open arms
- Share all materials and recordings from the meetings

Continue producing the essential materials for new joiners (but get better at disseminating the existing ones)
- Tech support
- Making the case

Get better at working virtually – virtual community in addition to face-to-face
- Use tools more effectively
- Re-open forums maybe? Review tech plan!

Provide hands-on support for under-resourced institutions
- Both with awareness raising at the instititutional level, and also
- Technical support
- Possibly provide financial support for start-up

Appoint representatives for different regions and outline clear goals/ deliverables
- Use board members to identify representatives

Provide help with technical questions – where can I find the answers?

Identify communities that are not really involved in consortium activities (e.g. French OCWC members) and find out how to integrate them.

Be more multi-lingual, translate materials, etc.

Make an effort to identify some of the specific question that come out of diversity (some cultures have strong oral histories – implications for OCWC?)
- Let's discuss the different models

Use prizes (example from Spain) for top materials (recognition, dissemination) to increase awareness of what is happening, what types of courses people are producing, stimulate a sense of community.
- Recognise author(s) and institution
- Promote on OCWC web-site

Reduce costs barriers to participate
- Find ways to bring down costs of conferences (cheaper hotels, not include all meals, low season)
- Open source conferences are pretty frugal
- Fees are not really an issue for institutions, but need to be careful with non-profit or smaller affiliates

Make an effort to gather and disseminate more information about OCW projects
- What challenges exist?
- How do institutions cope with them?
- What research/assessment is being done?


Other topics that came up, not necessarily related to goal III:
- Quality
- Conference organisation (announce earlier, review content, make all slides available, make audio recordings)
Search button on consortium site does not search the consortium web-site