This presentation will report on some project-based and discussion-based courses whose materials were published on MIT OpenCourseWare as open-educational resources. These courses are often among the most exciting and valuable in a student’s educational experience, and while they typically have an array of useful course materials associated with them, the real substance of the course arises from interactions among the students themselves as they work together in teams. Capturing the dynamism and creativity of these interactions seems essential if we hope to expand the range of OER beyond the traditional model of the lecture class. MIT OpenCourseWare has taken strides in this direction with a number of recent course publications in which teamwork on projects represents the focus of the instruction. I will highlight key features that illustrate this effort from three recently published OCW course sites: CMS.611J Creating Video Games, 6.811 Principles and Practice of Assistive Technology, and 20.219 Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show. Among these features are a timeline that shows how the iterative design process unfolds over the course of a semester, with links to video resources at telltale points; videos of student presentations of their projects at milestones during the semester, indicating what has been proposed, attempted, rejected, and pursued, and why; student reflections on their experience, sometimes retrospective after the class has ended, and sometimes contemporaneous as the class is unfolding, by video interview, blog, or vlog. These student resources are then balanced by instructor insights that explain the pedagogic approach and the challenges of teaching courses in which creativity is encouraged and assessed, and failure is not just likely but essential to success.
