Foundation:Planning:Education:CommunityCourses

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Overview

Vision

Ongoing series online courses run jointly by professors and Mozilla community members, providing opportunities for community building and learning on topics most important to Mozilla at any given moment.

Context

Mozilla-related educational activities like those at Seneca College are primarily oriented toward teaching Mozilla technologies and practices to programmers in a computer science context; in addition, they employ the traditional academic model of full-term courses taught in a classroom or other physical setting. While valuable, such activities do not address the following:

• Education in project aspects beyond core development, release engineering, and related tasks.
• Education for more casual Mozilla contributors.
• Education of students regardless of their physical location or institutional affiliation.

The "community courses" approach is intended to address (to one degree or another) all three of the above issues.

Thesis

• x

Desired outcomes

• x

How it will work

Topics

• we need to pick one or two topics to start with, ideally tied to areas where Mozilla has strong content along with a desire for more outreach. could be:
  • open web technologies (for web design and tech students)
  • design in the open (for design students)
  • community marketing (for business students)
  • open web in society (for business students)

Approach

• based in the Mozilla community, ideally with an academic partner to guide and drive each course
• each course builds a learning framework around existing Mozilla activities and materials
  • for example, a community marketing course could build around SpreadFirefox and the campus reps programs
• students would be given small tasks / assignments to complete that a) offer a chance to contribute to Mozilla but b) don't create alot of noise or tax the community
  • this is different than Seneca in that the contribution opportunities are both lower bar and go less deep into the community
• uses model similar to Dave Wiley's successful open education course at BYU
  • some students are registered locally at the university for credit
  • others are simply participating online for their own learning purposes (like they are auditing)
  • of those participating online, some may be getting independent study credit at their own university
  • http://open.byu.edu/ipt692r-wiley/syllabus/
  • http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Introduction_to_Open_Education_2009
• could also tie into the emerging p2p university initiative if that gets traction
  • http://www.peer2peeruniversity.org/

Products / stuff we'll create

• xxx

Use cases

Student at university

• xxx
• <elaborate>

Independent learner

• xxx
• <elaborate>

Professor

• xxx
• <elaborate>

Mozilla contributor

• xxx
• <elaborate>

Resources

Things we have

• Mozilla University Course Roadmap (outdated, but could be useful reference)
• xxx
• what else?

Things we need

• what's missing? what do we need to build?

Financial

• xxx

Roadmap

Q1 2009

xxx

Q2 2009

xxx

Q3 2009

xxx

Q4 2009

xxx

Beyond

xxx