Over the past decade, MIT has shared its course materials with over100 million individuals, and MIT OCW is laying out an ambitious roadmap for the next decade, with the goal of expanding its reach ten-fold: "to reach a billion minds."

And clearly, MIT OCW isn't just a resource for other educators. As its usage figures demonstrate, the program helps provide a great service to meet the educational needs of learners all over the world.

"It's quite humbling for us to see the impact OpenCourseWare has had," says Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, Chair of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee and a member of the original faculty panel that first proposed the program. "We set out to create a resource other faculty could draw on to improve their classes, and tapped into a much larger need around the world. Millions of people have come to the site for the chance to learn, even without credit offered or access to faculty."

The Next Decade for MIT OCW

In its quest to magnify its impact, MIT OpenCourseWare plans to expand some of its recent iniatives and focus on four key areas in the coming years:

1. Sharing OpenCourseWare Everywhere: MIT makes the course packages available for download via its own website, and there are over 250 other sites that mirror the content. The videos are available on YouTube, and MIT OCW recently released an iPhone app. "To reach a billion people," says MIT, "we'll make OCW content easy to find, adapt OCW materials to distribution methods such as mobile phones, and develop new approaches to reaching underserved populations."

2. Serving Key Audiences: MIT has created "High School Highlights," a program to help U.S. high school students with science and technology. It's also launched OCW Scholar, open courses specifically tailored to independent learners.

3. Creating Open Learning Communities: In conjunction with OpenStudy, MIT OCW has created an interactive learning environment where those pursuing a particular course can study together, work collaboratively, and answer one another's questions. MIT OCW plans to focus more on building out these sorts of social learning networks and opportunities.

4. Empowering Educators Worldwide: "Educators are a key multiplier for us," says MIT. "By bringing OCW materials into their classrooms, they share our content with millions, many of whom may lack internet access. In our next decade, MIT will strive to provide educators everywhere with the tools they need to serve these students."

In May of this year, MIT will co-host the annual meeting of the OpenCourseWare Consortium on the MIT campus, welcoming 300 representatives of leading OCW programs from around the world. The event will look back at the past decade of MIT OpenCourseWare, but also look to the future of bringing open educational resources to learners worldwide.

These aren't distance learning classes - there is no instructor, no contact with MIT, no credit. But the courses are meant to be stand-alone offerings, not requiring any additional materials for learning.

The OCW Scholar courses are aimed at providing these learners with a more complete set of materials, so that those taking the courses needn't turn elsewhere for other resources - such as journal articles - in order to complete the curriculum. These new OCW courses combine materials from multiple MIT courses, and the OCW team has worked with university faculty and teaching assistants to create new materials specifically designed for this project.

The Physics 1 class, for example, contains a set of video lectures from MIT physics professor Walter Lewin, a set of course notes (replacing the need for a traditional textbook), a set of class slides, homework problems, homework help videos (in which Lewin helps learners through solving the problems), links to related materials, and an online study group at OpenStudy where you can connect with other independent learners.

MIT OCW plans to publish 20 OCW Scholar courses over the next three years, all focused on introductory college-level science, math, engineering and other foundational subjects. This first set of courses that launch today include 8.01SC Physics I, 8.02SC Physics II, 18.01SC Calculus I, 18.02SC Calculus II and 3.091SC Introduction to Solid State Chemistry.

The OCW Scholar courses are a new approach to MIT OpenCourseWare, but as the program notes, this is meant to complement not replace the other OCW publications. "We're still committed to publishing MIT's materials as we always have," says OCW Executive Director Cecilia d'Oliveira, "and our core publication continues to provide tremendous value to educators and students around the world. With OCW Scholar, we are enhancing our support for independent learners and building on what we've accomplished with the rest of the site."

As we recently reported, MIT OpenCourseWare has continued to grow in popularity, with 9.6 million visitors last year and tens of millions of files downloaded from the site, from YouTube and from iTunesU. The expansion of the program is meant to increase the scalability of OCW, making sure that more people can have access to these educational resources.

The figures show strong growth for what is one of the world's premier open educational resources, with an increase in visits and visitors between 2009 and 2010.

Posted by MIT OpenCourseWare's Steve Carson, here are some of the statistics from MIT OCW's 2010:

Notable among these figures are users' preferences for content delivery via iTunes U and YouTube, as opposed to downloading a zip file containing a course package. Also interesting: visitors from the MIT community are only 1% of those who use the service, successfully fulfilling the program's mission of "open sharing of MIT teaching materials with educators, students, and self-learners around the world."

Erroneous reports last year suggested that MIT OCW was investigating a paywall for its courses, but as we reported in October, that's not in the works. And as part of building a sustainable opencourseware ecosystem, MIT OCW has teamed up with the social learning network OpenStudy in order to provide study groups for those working their way through OCW curriculum.

But if you're interested in the faculty lectures and the discussion groups, whether or not you decide to pursue the degree program, then you're welcome to participate for free in what the school calls a "revolutionary 'try before you buy' approach."

Touting the school's growth over the last seven years, LSBF founder, Aaron Etingen says, "The online world makes it hard to predict but what we do know is that this is going to change education forever!"

While Facebook does seem to be a place where college students go to talk with each other about their university experiences (educational and otherwise), I'm not at all convinced that Facebook will be an adequate platform to deliver a graduate school education. But certainly the number of users on the social networking site make it a good place for LSBF to advertise for their program.

Following the cease-and-desist letter, officials also emailed the students at all 23 universities in the Cal State system, warning them that selling their class notes online "including on the NoteUtopia website, is subject to discipline, up through and including expulsion from the university."

Fostering (and Fearing) Student Collaboration

Stevens says that NoteUtopia has complied with the letter, adding verbiage to the site to warn Cal State students. But he's not pleased with the message that the system sent to students as he feels as though it demonized a website that offers more than just a marketplace for students' class notes. NoteUtopia is meant to function as an online community where students can share information, discuss courses and rate professors - a supplement to, not a replacement for, offline education.

Cal State students could conceivably still share their notes - bypassing the typical $1 or so charge for a set of course-notes. And education code aside, sharing is something that is happening - whether it's being actively encouraged or not - as more students are opting to collaborate and learn together online.

It's worth noting, says Stevens, that sororities and fraternities have long had systems for sharing course materials among members. NoteUtopia merely "levels the playing field," using the Internet to allow anyone to have access to this information.

Who Owns Students' Notes?

"In school," says Stevens, "we're taught that if we put things in our own words, it isn't plagiarism. So it doesn't seem like the government should be able to tell us what to do with our own handwritten notes."

Indeed, the provision of the state education code does some raise questions about intellectual property and the ownership of ideas and course content. If the students don't own their class-notes - or at least, cannot sell them commercially - who does? The professor? The university? The state?

Stevens says he's trying to enlist the help of the EFF and the ACLU to make the case for students' rights here. Regardless, even as the California State School system decrees one thing, it seems clear that more students are interested in collaborating online - whether in a free and open forum or via a marketplace like NoteUtopia.

ReadWriteWeb has already written about data visualization capabilities in sites like Second Life. Due to a fledgling economy, many suggested that these institutionally-branded education initiatives may also become popular. Nevertheless, apart from this recent endorsement by the University of Texas, mainstream educators still don't have the green light to teach in virtual worlds. Many argue that video teleconferencing and instant messaging have replaced the need for virtual world interaction. However, neither of these offer the same immersive experience.

While we know that face-to-face learning is currently the most successful teaching method, if you had to choose an online learning environment, would you consider a virtual world? Let us know in the comments below.

Microsoft Folder-based Sites:: Education Labs also announced plans to roll out a website creator in mid-October. With this tool, teachers will be able to convert Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents into html files. From here the files can be shared with students as web pages and all the files are hosted at no cost through Microsoft. The group is currently testing different admin rights in order to allow for student uploads.

Flash Cards: This product allows you to create and browse flash card decks and create favorites with your Windows Live ID. Teachers create decks by adding images, text and sound to their cards. From here students flip through the decks in Silverlight 3. One interesting part of this project is that as students answer questions, the software remembers incorrect answers and prompts those problem cards more frequently. This project is due before 2010.

For more information on these projects, visit Educationlabs.com or check out the 30 minute demo video at the bottom of the Math Generator page.

2. Edutopia: The George Lucas Educational Foundation launched Edutopia in the hopes of creating educational best practices for multimedia in the classroom. The site includes online polls, curated blogs, assessment tools and a dedicated magazine for educators at the K-12 levels. The 2009 Webby Award winning site's best content is in its library of high-production videos for teachers and educators.

3. LearnHub: LearnHub is a network where members can create their own communities, share lessons, chat, create tests and tutor each other online at no cost. Schools create their own virtual classrooms where students complete assignments, play games and share photos and text. One of the great features of this site is that the site's report generator allows teachers to track users' progress. While the content is not as in-depth as Scitable's, this is a good site for standardized test preparation and basic K-12 education exercises. For more examples of test preparation sites, see our RWW list of resources.

4. Moodle: Moodle is a free open-source course management platform designed to help teachers create better online resources. Microsoft Education Labs recently announced a new Live@edu plug-in for Moodle. Now in addition to providing lesson plan, assignment and quiz-making tools for teachers, schools also gain access to Outlook Live for e-mail, Office Live Workspace for document sharing, Windows Messenger for chat and Windows Live SkyDrive for 25 GB of storage. This tool is slightly more advanced than some of the others in the industry, but it does offer a number of scalable solutions.

5. Edmodo: Edmodo is a private micro-blogging service for schools that allows teachers to edit privacy options within their virtual classrooms. Educators generate a join code and students log-in to chat, link to files, share notes and check their collective calendars for upcoming exams, quizzes and Pro-D days. While some of the other tools we've presented offer an open-access learning environment, this invite-only service offers students the chance to utilize web-based multimedia tools while allowing teachers to control an online discussion's security.

6. YouTube Edu: YouTube Edu allows students and educators to access lectures from leading educators across the country. For example, Yale and Brandeis University professors upload their lessons for public enjoyment. One of the most popular Channels is the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning - a collaboration launched by the Indian Institutes of Technology and Science in Bangalore.

7. ESL Video: ESL Video allows language educators to create quizzes from virtually any video on the internet. From here they can embed their quizzes into their classroom sites or redirect students to the ESL Video domain. Teachers tailor their video quizzes to specific learning units or create simple vocabulary quizzes like the one I made below using YouTube videos. While this tool may not be as sophisticated as some of the above services, its merit comes from the fact that teachers can incorporate pop culture products into their lesson plans with very little effort. Judging by the fact that the below Miley Cyrus video has more than 92 million YouTube views, teachers may be able to harness this tool to ignite a love of learning.

Let's be honest here, you're the educators! If you've got your own favorite resources, add them in the comments below.

Universities such as Duke, Stanford, MIT, and the University of California, among others, already post videos online both to YouTube and in iTunes U, a section of iTunes featuring audio and video podcasts. However, what UNSW is doing is unique - they're providing college credit to those watching the YouTube recordings.

YouTube U

While there's really little difference between physically showing up in a classroom to sit and listen to a lecture and viewing a video of the same lecture, few universities have allowed this type of unstructured remote learning to count as college credit for those who are not already enrolled in the university. Instead, colleges that support distance learning initiatives usually require students to apply for admission and pay tuition, just as any other student attending classes on campus would have to.

The fact that Buckland is not charging the high school students who are remotely attending his courses but is still giving them college credit is what makes what he's doing so different...and perhaps groundbreaking.

The process of UNSW's "YouTube education" is not entirely without structure, though. Only a limited number of high school students are chosen each year for this opportunity. Those who wish to attend must submit a statement as well as an academic reference from a teacher. In other words, receiving college credit for watching the videos isn't something available to anyone, anywhere - there is still a selection process that is adhered to.

Higher Learning or Marketing Campaign?

Colleges who want to follow in UNSW's footsteps could easily take this idea and turn it into a recruiting or marketing campaign for their university. By offering high school students transferable college credits valid at their particular institution, they could encourage the brightest young students to consider their university over others long before it came time to fill out the admissions packet.

No matter what reason a college may have for pursuing this type of remote learning, giving students the chance to work ahead - and at no additional expense to them - is an idea that hopefully spreads to other institutions worldwide.

Atomkeep is a service that aims to help users keep their profiles in sync across multiple networks. Registration is as simple as typing in your email address and a password. A confirmation email will be sent to your email address for verification. Unlike most sites, Atomkeep does not immediately prompt you to enter in the typical user information such as your name, birthday, etc. Instead, you're immediately taken to the 'Manage Accounts' page to choose from a list of social networks to import or merge existing data from. You can use your profiles from other networks to fill in your Atomkeep profile or manually add in this information yourself.

Supported networks for Atomkeep include:

• Twitter
• Plurk
• Disqus
• Facebook
• Technorati
• Blogger
• WordPress
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Last.FM
• Ning
• Pownce
• Yelp
• Youtube

Tons more are also supported with support for numerous more social networks on the way.

Synchronizing Your Profiles

You can synchronize all of your profiles or just one by providing your password for each account on the synchronization page. Atomkeep also shows you the synchronization process for each account that you choose to sync. Here's a demo video of how the synchronization process works.

Atomkeep.com: Step Four. Sync. from Olexandr Prokhorenko on Vimeo.

Too Many Social Networks

Are we spreading ourselves so thin across the web that we have to create more utilities in order to keep up? When services such as Atomkeep pop-up, one wonders if maybe we're joining too many social networks. On the other hand, there's no denying that Atomkeep is a handy tool if you're forever changing your information and can't stand the process of updating each of your accounts one by one.

Many people say that Twitter is frivolous and unimportant. In this case those people would be correct. Just six weeks ago the US Supreme Court rejected Exxon's appeal to drop a lawsuit alleging that its employees in Indonesia "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity" in defense of one of the world's largest liquid natural gas facilities. Placed in this context, whether or how this company deals with Twitter seems irrelevant.

The conversation about how Exxon should have or will deal with the spoofed Twitter account can be followed via a post last night on analyst Jeremiah Owyang's blog. It makes sense to tackle the general questions concerning "big brands" and new media, but a line should be drawn somewhere in order to keep technology in a larger perspective. The case of Exxon Mobil is on the other side of that line.

The Context in Indonesia

Indonesia is a sprawling country of more than 220 million people and an amazing 17,000 islands. It possesses huge amounts of liquid natural gas and gold and has major geo-political significance.

The country has a long and troubled history of international and internal conflicts but the US government's own documents detail US payment of local groups killing subversives based on US provided lists of individuals in the 1960's and US State Department acceptance of Indonesian government massacres of civilians using US supplied weapons in the 1970's.

Key player and Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger retained financial interests in the country's natural resources throughout the 1980's, the human rights abuses alleged to have been committed by Indonesian soldiers working as Exxon employees were far from the only crimes alleged to have been committed in the 1990's (see in addition the Dili Massacre, for example) and since the turn of the 21st century multiple US administrations have sent elite US military training groups to "train the trainers" in Indonesia despite US Congressional bans against direct co-operation with the Indonesian military on the basis of documented human rights abuses.

It's not a pretty picture. There's an intense history of globe-dominating nations doing horrible things to the people of Indonesia.

The Current Lawsuit

On June 16th, 2008 the US Supreme Court denied a request by Exxon Mobil to dismiss a lawsuit titled Exxon Mobil v. John Doe, 07-81, brought by international rights groups on behalf of 11 villagers in Indonesia's Aceh province. The suit alleges that Indonesian soldiers hired by Exxon Mobil "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity."

One British rights organization specializing in Indonesia, called Down To Earth, further reports that "the company has been accused of providing the military with buildings used for torturing local people suspected of involvement in the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and excavators to dig mass graves for the victims of military violence." The worst accounts of the treatment of civilians in Indonesia are something no one wants to read.

Exxon argued to the Supreme Court that the lawsuit against it should be dismissed because it involves issues of international relations that should be left to the Executive Branch. In 2002 the US State Department said that "adjudication of this lawsuit at this time would in fact risk a potentially serious adverse impact on significant interests of the United States..." Indonesia is a country heavily populated with Muslims and the US argued that a ruling on the Exxon lawsuit could harm anti-terrorist efforts, among other concerns.

Since that time various courts have shaped the debate such that now-resigned Solicitor General Paul Clement said this May that the case had been sufficiently narrowed to avoid harm to the nation's foreign policy interests. According to the Associated Press, the Bush administration urged the US Supreme Court to reject Exxon's request to drop the case this June.

Thus the lawsuit still stands and Exxon may, years later, have to answer to some allegations of human rights violations.

And what about Twitter? There may or may not be a time when Exxon's engagement with new social media is important, but this same summer when the Supreme Court has just said they will be judged is not that time.

New Media and International Human Rights

In October we wrote here about the last active bloggers in Burma, fighting to let the world know what was happening there as the military massacred monks and turned the country inside-out. In December we wrote about YouTube's deleting videos documenting torture of civilians by Egyptian police because of the site's policy against violent imagery. On the Fourth of July we wrote about the Iranian Parliament's consideration of the death penalty for subversive bloggers.

The internet and human rights intersect often. If we are to believe that these democratizing media are going to make the world a better place, then it's important to keep them in context regarding what's going on in the world outside of our tech niche. It's with that in mind that we point at the lawsuit and Supreme Court ruling against Exxon when the company's communication strategy with the world comes up in conversation.

After all, as Exxon Spokesperson Alan Jeffers said yesterday about Twitter: "It's our perception that social networking is based on honesty, transparency and trust..."

Photo: A market in Aceh, Indonesia. Creative Commons from Flickr user A. www.viajar24h.com

On Smart Mobs, Judy Breck points to a new book by the MIT Press called Augmented Learning by Klopfer. In the book, Klopfer makes a new argument for the untapped potential of mobile learning games which would use the strengths of a mobile platform - that is, "its portability, context sensitivity, connectivity, and ubiquity." These features, he says, would make it ideal for learning games from elementary school all the way through college.

The games themselves could be participatory, involving interaction with other players, or augmented reality, meaning set in a virtual world and they could be produced at a much lower cost than traditional PC or console games.

What's most important about them, though, besides their ability to solidify information the students were introduced to through traditional methods, is that the games help teach "21st century skills" like the ability to "tackle complex problems and acquire information in just-in-time fashion." In other words, start training the kids young for their future hyper-connected, multi-tasking, digital lives.

Klopfer believes that mobile learning, or m-learning as he calls it, is just another means of e-learning, and one that just moves off the internet-connected PC to the more common mobile device.

For students, teachers, researchers, and game designers, the book may be a compelling read since it delves into the design, research, and implementation of how mobile learning games could work in the classroom.

Issues With M-Learning

Although mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous these days, introducing mobile learning into the classroom as early as elementary school, may be a bit too soon for some parents, who don't believe their kids should tote cell phone at age 8 or, if they do, then it's a phone designed to call mom and dad and/or 911 only.

Even as children get older, there are still the issues of various mobile plans and the cost of data use - details that the students may not be aware of, racking up charges that parents won't be happy about all because the child's teacher told them to break out their phones for today's lesson.

Finally, the digital divide between the "haves" and "have-nots" would become more apparent in a classroom if students had to provide their own phones. Imagine the privileged kids pullinig out their iPhones, others pulling out ancient clamshells, and still others having to raise their hands because they are without.

Still, the idea has merit - it's definitely an interesting take on e-learning, but there are definitely challenges to its real-world use that must be overcome first.

It doesn't look like Harvest on Twitter supports starting the timer, though that would be nice for anyone who does work away from a desk that needs to be timed.

When Danny Wen of Harvest emailed us to let us know about the upcoming Twitter integration, he told us that the company looks at "the integration as a start of bringing more business use cases to Twitter." We agree, and further it could signal a potential business model for Twitter. While currently everything on Twitter is free -- from setting up an account, to running a bot, to using the API -- it seems plausible that Twitter could start charging for business uses.

Harvest is essentially using Twitter to power a quick mobile interface with their application and that's something that perhaps Twitter should start charging for.