(from Mary Lou Forward)

This week marks the end of my first year as Executive Director of the OCW Consortium.  This past year’s staff efforts could be characterized as building and connecting. We’ve added staff from around the world to focus on the needs of our members, promote openness in education with new audiences, and generally advance the movement.  This geographic spread of our staff – Korea, Mexico, South Africa and the US – means that you can find consortium staff online and working with nearly 24 hour per day coverage.  Many of you have had the opportunity to connect with staff and Board members this year, and we’re looking forward to more connections over the coming year.  We hope you’ve been enjoying the new newsletter format and the monthly webinar offerings.  If you have news items or suggestions, please let us know through feedback@ocwconsortium.org.

Building on these foundations, we’re moving now to focusing on Community and Impact.  The OCW/OER community is full of motivated, dedicated (and busy!) people.  We want to provide meaningful ways for people to interact and stay connected with others around the world.  Our goal is to foster an interactive community of practice, with discussion and working groups in areas that are meaningful to you.  We started doing this with Ning groups a few months ago, and are now in the process of migrating these groups to BuddyPress so they can be fully integrated into our website.  If there’s a group you’d like to start, let us know.

As the movement grows, it’s becoming increasingly important for us to demonstrate the impact of OCW.  We need to do this in three ways: by supporting research and dissemination of data collected; by highlighting projects and innovative approaches around the world; and through creating a library of case studies that we can all draw upon.  We won’t be able to do any of these things without your help.  Please remember to send us your usage data every quarter so we can aggregate it and make it available on our website (we will only provide aggregated data, not those from individual projects).   Let us know if you or your students are involved in research on open education and its impacts – we would love to highlight this and share the results.  We are beginning a project showcase on our website, some of which will be featured on our homepage slideshow.  Consortium staff will be contacting many of you over the coming year to discuss your projects so we can add them to the showcase, however, we would be happy to hear from you with updates anytime.  Finally, we would like to collect your stories of OCW use and impact for our case study library.  The more we can highlight usage around the world, the stronger the movement will be.

Thanks, as ever, for your work and enthusiasm.