Educators: sign up to learn and play w/ Mozilla

Mozilla, Creative Commons and P2P University will kick off an exciting experiment next week  — a short course for educators who want to learn how to use open tech, open licensing and open teaching approaches.

The idea is to give educators the basic content, tech and teaching tools they need to jump into the world of open education. Participants will get to learn and play with people like:

1. Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard and Dion Almaer — basic open web tech for teaching, plus emerging tech like open <video>.
2. Ahrash Bissell and Lila Bailey from Creative Commons — licensing 101 for open educational content.
3. Brigham Young’s Dave Wiley and Seneca’s Dave Humphrey — case studies of cutting edge participatory learning efforts.

The whole thing will be hosted by Philipp Schmidt from the University of the Western Cape / P2P University.

Half the course is webinars and chats with the folks above. The other half is focused on participant projects that apply the ideas discussed in the course. We’re hoping for projects like:

• A plan or mockup for improving education.mozilla.org, Mozilla’s emerging platform for educators.
• A spec for turning Firefox into the ‘educational platform for the future’ by pulling together addons for specific education use cases
• A design concept for an e-portfolio that follows students around the web, and can be used for recognition and assessment of their work on blogs, wikis, in discussion threads, etc.

The idea is similar to the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: deepen learning and engage in an open innovation brainstorm by building a practical design element into the course.

Why is this an experiment? Two reasons …

1. We want to expand the focus of Mozilla Education beyond code and computer science, but don’t quite know what this should look like. This course is a first attempt to bring Mozilla Education themes to an audience beyond (student) developers.
2. We have a theory that online courses are a good way to share skills and get people involved in Mozilla — but it’s just a theory. This course plus the Labs Design Challenge are testing this theory.

This experiment offers up the chance to learn and play with some amazing people along the way. Even if it sputters a little as a course format, the content and interaction promise to be great.

If you’re an educator and this sounds interesting, there is still time to sign up. We’re almost full now, but are open to sneaking in a few more people who come with amazing participant project ideas.

Comments are closed.