Ragged University is about highlighting projects and free resources.  One of the friends of Ragged is Community Open Online Courses – a platform for sharing your knowledge and creating your own MOOC.  COOCs is not a part of Ragged Uni, but a friend and affiliate…

 

One of the most important resources in the age of Massive Open Online Courses, the vision of Peter Shukie was to create a platform where everyone could be a teacher as well as a learner.  Community Open Online Courses – COOCs for short – is the web resource which allows you to use the same technology as many universities and colleges around the world use to deliver their teaching; Moodle.

Visit the COOCs website to create your own online course, take a stroll through the courses which other people have created; or both: the perfect tool to learn through teaching:

coocs.org

 

What is unique is the open philosophy of this space which manifests the original vision of how digital technology can empower learning in self creating communities… The perfect compliment to face to face learning !

COOCs: Free Knowledge We Create Ourselves by Peter Shukie

A city contains many experts, incredible knowledge, local talents and millions of ideas.  For most of us what we have learned is from our lives, other inspirational people with something to share.  We all have something to give that is not always applicable to a course, or a certificate or a room full of people.  It might be local knowledge, specialised expertise or a persoanl refelction or way of dealing with a problem.

Much of this brilliance is lost, or remains dormant, as only a few places exist that share knowledge (schools, universities, colleges, training centres) and these tend toward a specific number of courses and practices.  Althoigh it does happen everywheer else, it misses most of us.  It is hard to find, and we rely on luck and serendipity.

What if we changed the way we looked at knowledge and teaching and said that anyone can be a teacher?  Instead of formal courses and certificates we all had the opportunity to add something to the collective brain of the city? Teaching could be a video, a poem, a series of photographs and a forum that asked other people to join in.

My idea is a website that suggests we can all join, share some learning we want others to be involved with, to know and to contribute to.  Everyone who takes part learns more about  how to share ideas, how to involve others in developing knolwedge, creates a culture based on giving and learns the value of their own expertise and opinions – no matter how local, how specialised.  We could all teach, and by doing that we would change what teaching means!

It would be free, it would allow anyone to take part and the learning would be done in a community (hence the COOCS – community, open and online).  We would focus on creation and particpation, not examinations and certificates.

Together, the contributions would create a massive resource of wide and diverse ideas and knowledge that we could dip in, see how others think and feel about the world about them.  We could recreate ‘teaching’ not as a thing others do, but that we all do. Not just something in purpose built buildings, but also anywhere that learning is needed.