OCW Consortium Announces Winners of 2013 Site Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence
“These three sites are outstanding examples of the creativity, dedication and generosity that are hallmarks of the OCWC community,” said OCW Consortium Executive Director Mary Lou Forward. ”We are thrilled to recognize their efforts and help draw attention to their contributions to the global body of open educational resources.”
Notre Dame OpenCourseWare was named as the recipient of the Landmark Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence. The University of Notre Dame was one of the founding members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and launched their OCW site in 2006. The site currently has more than 50 courses in 24 subject areas, and in 2012 the site received visits from 300,000 individuals in 211 countries and territories around the world.
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya OCW received the Outstanding New Site Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence. Sharing material from more than 200 UPC courses, the UPC OCW platform is also integrated with different information systems of the university: Prisma, which supports certain management processes, including curriculum, students and academic records, registration and assessment; Gauss provides information about users, site work; and finally the library catalog provides information on the books of the recommended bibliography.
Peer 2 Peer University has been named as the recipient of the Technical Innovation Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence for the creation of an e-mail tool, called the MOOC Maker, for offering Massive Open Online Courses using OpenCourseWare and other Open Educational Resources. Originally developed and used for a courses called The Mechanical MOOC – A Gentle Introduction to Python, which enrolled 8,000 learners in the fall of 2012 and early 2013, the MOOC Maker has subsequently been used to structure a course through the MIT Media Lab called Learning Creative Learning, which enrolled 24,000 learners.
About the University of Notre Dame
Founded in 1842, the University of Notre Dame is the United States’ preeminent Catholic university and is rated among the top 25 of all U.S. institutions of higher learning. Notre Dame is organized into four undergraduate colleges — Arts and Letters, Science, Engineering, and the Mendoza College of Business — the School of Architecture, the Law School, the Graduate School, 10 major research institutes, more than 40 centers and special programs, and the University library system. Located adjacent to the city of South Bend, approximately 90 miles east of Chicago, it is highly residential, with 80 percent of students living on campus, and also is known for the quality of its physical plant and the beauty of its campus, including the Golden Dome of the Main Building, the world’s most recognized university landmark.
About Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC) is a public institution dedicated to higher education and research, specialised in the fields of engineering, architecture and science. In a highly creative context, the UPC’s research, teaching and management projects are based on the principles of freedom, justice, democracy, solidarity, cooperation, sustainability, efficiency, transparency and social responsibility. They also reflect the University’s commitment to the environment and to change. With a focus on intellectual rigor, critical thinking, a transversal approach to knowledge, educational innovation and entrepreneurship, the UPC produces competent professionals with the skills they need to tackle present and future challenges.
About Peer 2 Peer University
Peer 2 Peer University (we mostly just say P2PU) is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. Learning for the people, by the people. About almost anything.