We’re very excited to announce that University of Alaska Fairbanks has joined the OCWC. From Chris Lott, a technologist on the project, via his blog Ruminate:

Having finally negotiated the administrative paperwork necessary to proceed, the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) has officially begun its open education initiative– uLearn– by becoming a member of the OpenCourseWare consortium (OCW). We don’t have a cool site to debut ala BC Campus’ Free Learning site (from which we plan to liberally crib) or even a single course put up yet! But we do have plans…

As Chris says, the site is nascent, but the plans are fairly developed. Rather than offer all their courses online uLearn will:

focus on a few academic areas– including information fluency, ocean science, and Arctic, Circumpolar and Alaska oriented fields– and in service of some underserved needs such as courses based wholly on open materials and offerings which address integration of learning community and social learning interactions.

You should check out the descriptions of the four major initiatives over at the site, but the one I find most fascinating is the Ocean Sciences distance curriculum:

At the Center for Distance Education we have developed one of a very few wholly web-based Ocean Science laboratory courses that will be– in its current configuration– particularly useful to faculty wishing to deliver a– or enhance an existing– ocean science course to distance students. Our geographic location and current events have demanded a particular emphasis on climate change, sea ice, and other circumpolar concerns that make this course unique. We hope to develop a version of this course that will be as useful to independent learners as it already is to those in a guided education environment.

In other words, this is already a unique course — a hands-on lab, no less — that was developed for distance learners. In conversations I’ve had with the Center, they’ve stressed to me how transformative this class has been for them — they are not only teaching a hands-on lab to a worldwide audience — but because they have that worldwide student body submitting lab data to them, the class has become an invaluable tool for data collection on the state of oceans around the globe. If they can preserve that aspect in their delivery of the OCW version (which will have a peer to peer support aspect), the potential upside for our knowledge of the world is huge.

Congratulations UAF! We look forward to seeing uLearn grow.