It’s been a few months already since Vitaly Repin pointed us to a project of his: a MOOC about Free Software and I still haven’t mentioned it here.
As they realized that most people are not aware about the complexities of the digital world we live in, the idea of creating a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) dedicated to these important questions appeared. Richard Stallman liked it and suggested to re-use parts of his video tapes in order to create the course. It has been done but some of the parts had to be redone. They made recordings in Helsinki for this as well as the intro video to the course.
I haven’t seen much of it yet, but I can already tell that they put a lot of effort into it to get it done.
So, on May 4, 2015 (May the Forth be with you!) the course was released at Eliademy. The course contains videos, quizzes and forum discussions. Its contents are released under CC BY-NC-SA.
There’s already been some interesting discussion on FSFE’s mailing list about platforms like Eliademy. However, regardless of the platform where it is published, the videos are released under CC BY-ND license and the material is also available on Vitaly’s personal website.
I’m personally more concerned about the ND clause in the videos and the NC clause for the content than any proprietary platform that may use the content.
Vitaly plans to publish it in the Common Cartridge format any time soon now after the first course iteration has been completed. This format is supported by different LMS (e.g., Moodle) and it will allow the local teachers to use the course materials in their educational activities.
He would be more than happy if anybody decides to use the videos they made in other platforms and can spread the word about this course. And there is much more what you can do: provide any feedback on the content, provide translations, improve it, add quizzes, create subtitles, etc.