When many people think of Open Education, their minds may naturally go to the exceptional online lecture series that have been created by universities such as Yale, MIT, and Stanford.  For students who normally wouldn’t have access to traditional schooling, these freely available videos give students the feeling that they are sitting with other students, right there in the classroom.  Here at the Saylor Foundation, we wanted to provide students that opportunity for more lectures and courses.  So, following in the footsteps of these prestigious institutions, we would like to announce the start of our own classroom lecture series program.

Dr. Kenneth Manning, who teaches a number of Mechanical Engineering courses at SUNY Adirondack, graciously volunteered to help us kick off our effort this semester.  By allowing our cameras into his Dynamics and Mechanics of Materials classrooms, Dr. Manning is projecting his voice across the web, reaching millions of users.  What’s more, stemming from our commitment to bringing our users as open an experience as possible, all of these videos will be licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution license.  This means that, once completed, students and educators will be able to take, distribute and remix these lectures however they wish.

And the positives don’t stop there.  Longtime Saylor users are undoubtedly familiar with the problem of link rot that we contend with on a daily basis: sometimes you might start a course and then halfway through, you are unable to access some of the resources due to broken links. Well, for those of you interested in taking either our ME102 or ME202 course – you need not worry anymore!  With the addition of these videos, both of those courses will 100% sustainable and guaranteed.

We are actively seeking more volunteers who might be interested in filming their lectures for other courses and disciplines in the coming summer and fall semesters.  If you are a professor committed to the ideals of open education, and not afraid to lecture in front of a camera, please contact me for more details.