Working on a shoestring budget, engaging learners, using new Web 2.0 technologies…sound familiar?

Rip Mix Learners is a student-run Open Courseware project, in which students make audio recordings of the lectures, compile class notes, and other materials and share them with their peers online. The site is publicly accessible, but our main audience are the students themselves. We have been running it on a shoe-string budget for the last year, with a little support from the GTZ to purchase audio recorders for the students and a bit of staff time paid for by the Shuttleworth Foundation

When I visited the Rip Mix Learners web site, I immediately encountered DokuWiki, the free open source wiki that does NOT require MySQL database backend. DokuWiki, like PMwiki (another non-MySQL based database), is powerful. Even more powerful is an environment that supports this kind of sharing, as discussed in the Sharing Nicely Blog (via Stephen Downes):

• Students from Zimbabwe had been asking her for materials on Natural Medicine, and complained that they couldn’t find anything online. She pointed them to the resources that her fellow students had compiled, and which she had been using for a few weeks. The Zimbabweans couldn’t believe that Universities were publishing course materials like this online – Aqeelah proudly pointed out that not all Universities are doing it (I would like to add “not yet”), but that her friends were actually running the project.
• When the lecturer spilt coffee over his computer and lost all of his data, the students provide him with a backup of his lecture notes, which they had stored online. I can just imagine how the students loved it.
• Finally, the site became so popular with other students in the class, that they started demanding immediate upload of the notes. Complaints rolled in if the materials had not bee uploaded within hours after the lecture.

Subscribe to Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net