Re: [seul-edu] Our Strengths --develop a course & teach it

[Jeff Nelson <jtnelson@emirates.net.ae>]

Les, I think that's a great idea.  I think this challenge has two parts--1. 
develop a free curriculum and materials; 2. teach it.

To do that, we need a person who is good at curriculum development to 
shepherd a project.  We also need some sort of collaborative environment 
set up.  (I think wikis are great, but what do I know?)

They're working on doing both of these things in Colombia.  There's a project 
to develop public-domain curriculum and they have offered free short courses 
in Linux usage and system administration for technically literate teachers.  

Links to the projects in Colombia are at:
	 http://itp.innoved.org/wiki/freecourse/Links

They've made a substantial effort to generate a curriculum in Spanish, which 
can be found on one of those links.  

I think we need to do something similar, but in English.  

I've been trying to develop a public-domain curriculum and lesson plans for 
end-users, not sysadmins, at http://itp.innoved.org/wiki/freecourse.  
However, I've only been teaching (English) for 6 years and I have never 
developed an entire curriculum from scratch.  It's a much bigger project than 
I thought at first, and I'm not sure I have the experience and training to do 
it properly.  

So we need someone who has this kind of experience to manage and guide the 
project.  

We also need people to contribute lessons and materials.  

It would be excellent if we could produce a series of training videos.  Then 
we could teach without actually being there, and the videos could multiply 
like rabbits, if they are GPL'ed or public domain.  

There needs to be some fairly high-profile leadership, or else it will have 
trouble getting off the ground.  

Jeff Nelson
itp.innoved.org

On Wednesday 28 November 2001 21:14, you wrote:
> One important goal that has been recognized is the importance of
> administrative talent to install and manage these systems.
>
> Ok, what are we good at?
>
> Education, right? So why don't we deliver the "education" to train
> administrators.
>
> Are we in competition with others in this task? Yes.
>
> Can we do it better than others? Undoubtedly.
>
> Do we already have all the tools? Yes.
>
> What's holding us back? <grin>