In 2001, I spent a year teaching English in Wuhan University of Science and Technology. That certainly gave me a first flavor of Chinese university life, but I still understood very little about the Chinese higher education system – partly because that university was a private-public venture, which (at least my campus) seemed to focus [...]

I have been very interested in the work of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) for a long time. It’s one of the mega-universities in the world, perhaps the biggest, with close to two million students. I wrote a very excited post earlier about how they have opened almost all of their educational material, and [...]

In October, University of Toronto participated in the world-wide Open Access Week with a number of different events. I got the honor of starting off with the first event (although I believe there was one event the week before), with a presentation about Innovative projects in the publishing of OER. I’ve always been interested in [...]

In September, someone called from L’Actualité, a weekly magazine based in Montreal, and wanted to interview me about Peer2Peer University. The final article keeps mentioning us in the same sentence as University of the People, whereas I think we are quite different, but it’s great to get the word out to the over one million [...]

I just finished reading “My freshman year”, an ethnographic book about a professor enrolling as a student at her own university, and spending a year living in the dormitory, to try to understand why she feels so disconnected from the contemporary student culture. The book was published under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan, but a journalist [...]

I love when different “open” movements can come together and mutually enhance each other, whether it’s using open source software for the production of open educational materials, or using CC-licensed music when creating a CC-licensed documentary. John Willinsky, who recently gave a talk at OISE as part of OA week 2009, has written an article [...]

I just came across a newsreport on the Swedish television site (in Swedish) about “top teachers” in Korea. This teachers work at the different cram schools, and their lessons are also filmed and made available online for a subscription fee. Some of these teachers have become virtual superstars, making more than $10 million per year, [...]