Recently, the Media Department at Coventry School of Art and Design, UK, has launched four open media classes, all of which are freely available online (http://openmediaclasses.covmedia.co.uk/). These classes are open to anyone, to participate in, contribute discussion to, and even rip, remix and mash-up. This applies to the schedule, lectures/lesson contents, resources and assignments, online talks, interviews with visiting speakers and a number of practical ‘how to’ videos - all available under a CC-BY-SA license.
Each of our panel presentations includes a ‘walk-through’ of the OER sites featured, and each has a dedicated feedback space that has been opened for the conference.
1: Photography - Jonathan Worth
Photography and Narrative (http://www.phonar.org) and Picturing the Body (http://www.picbod.org) are our longest-standing open classes. After featuring in Wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/08/free-online-class-shakes-up-photo-education/), where they were described as ‘shaking up education’, approx. 1,000 people signed-up in the following week to join the classes. 29,000 people from 1,632 cities in 107 countries have passed through these classes since Sept. 2011, helping to make BA Photography one of the most over-subscribed in the University. Now we can evaluate our model for enabling academics, students and practitioners - both inside and outside the university - to collaboratively produce, curate and engage with diverse media and educational resources relating to photography.
2: Creative Activism – Pete Woodbridge
Creative Activism (http://www.creativeactivism.net/), the most recent of the four Open Media classes, explores the potential of creative media activism by encouraging the participants to experiment in creating ‘live’ media interventions - becoming involved in a number of crucial cultural, political and social debates (e.g. Human rights, Occupy and student protests). This class enables students to develop their skills in creating media to advocate a cause, make a case, or address an injustice; using our ‘open’ approach to encourage students to make their work visible beyond the classroom environment and to collaborate with and participate in external networks and organisations.
3: Open Media: the Philosophy – Shaun Hides
After presenting case studies of the classes in photography and creative activism, this panel provides an overview of the Open Media philosophy which underpins our original approach to Open Education. This strategy - currently a ‘live’ experiment - has been developed to address, head-on, some of the challenges faced by HE in the 21st century: significance/engagement for students, the search for new sustainable practices and economies, becoming visible amidst the crowd, trust in communities, and devising novel, relevant pedagogies.
4: Open Media: the Future – Jonathan Shaw
The panel concludes with a presentation linking together our recent and future uses of diverse tools and platforms– e.g. Blogs, Vimeo, Flicker, Abode DPS, iBooks,and Apps, to share and disseminate our research and educational materials. For example, Living Books About Life (http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/) produced twenty one OER books about life in just 7 months; while Photographic Mediations (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/itunes-u/photographic-mediations/id385898860), originally a small day-long symposium with c.50 attendees, has now been listened to nearly1,000,000 times via iTunesU. Finally, we outline some novel ways we are exploring new media and publishing platforms, and establishing new collaborations.