Hello list,

I've been spinning this idea for e-education around in my head for a while now, and I thought i'd pass it by you guys for reason that will become clear should you decide to keep reading this.

Basically I'd like to develop a community that spreads knowlegde in a similar model as BitTorrent spreads data. For those of you unfamiliar with BT, it is an advanced P2P program that uses a very cool way of distributing bandwith. (check http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/ if you'd like to know more). Basically its makes it possible for you to download i.e. a fodera iso and even during your download you'll be sharing the bits that you have allready got with others that are downloading. This eases the load of the first "seeder" a lot since after enough people have been getting the iso, the seed will have been planted and the original seeder can retire and use his bandwith for other things. Also, if you as a downloader allow a high number of uploads you'll get a higher "ratio" which basically means that your downloads will go faster aswell. So good sharing behaviour is rewarded.

Today's most common learning enviroments are schools, physical places we go to where profesional teachers do there very best to teach us their knowledge. If you are not able to go to these places (for whatever reason) you could choice between expensive commercial "home-study" schools, or you could turn to books.

The concept for OKOU would add a new option, one more inline with the current trend towards open source & p2p sharing. Suppose that a music technology faculty was allready opened at the OKOU and that today we would be signing up for a course called "DSP with Pure Data level I" by none other then Miller S. Puckette (DISCLAIMER: I have not communicated any of this with Miller, this is just to illustrate my point). We logon to www.openknowledgeonline.edu select the course and we get some basic information about the course. It states that this is a beginner level course, that no prior DSP is required but that some basic math would be necessary. It also reffers to http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/techniques.htm as the main text for this course. Within a few days we receive an email that the course is about to start and that we are expected to have read the first chapter of the text by then. We also receive an url thats intended for students of that particular course. We go there and find some links and a forum where we are asked to introduce ourselves to our fellow students by Miller. Here we find out what level our fellow students are at and perhaps solve a few riddles with installing pd. It's also got a schedule for the whole course.

Schedule for DSP with PD level I

Date Topic pre-Class Where? 17 march Start of course 19 march Introduction read Ch. 1 DSP_PD_1 on irc://openknowledgeonline.edu:6667 23 march Wavetable read ch. 2 DSP_PD_1 on irc://openknowledgeonline.edu:6667 etc.

At the end of our introduction class we'll be given an assigment to work on before next class. Miller will be available on the forum if we need help, but its advised to aks help fromyour fellow students first, and ofcourse to help them. ofcourse we thank our teacher for all that he has taught us and we move on.

At the end of the course we're asked to solve a few problems individually after they are completed succesfully a student has "passed" the course. This is great because we now have the knowledge to take the course "DSP with PD level II". Our teacher here is Frank Barknecht. Similar events to Level 1 follow and we thank our teacher again. But now, all of the sudden, we are receiving a request from the OKOU board to teach "DSP with PD level 1" to a group of eager new students. What? Me? But i only just learned this stuff. How am *I* going to be able to teach this? Well first of all, you passed the course and you've sinced moved on to the 2nd level of that course, so you must have some grip on the material by now. You wont be thrown in the deep all alone, you can email Frank Barknecht if you really cant help somebody out, he'll be your mentor during your first teaching class. Maybe I'd say that I would rather teach about a topic i have a little more grip on and suggest i could do a course on basic western harmony. The board replies that they are very happy if I did that because nobody had volunteerd to do such a course up till now. Jesse Liberty will contact me and help me set the course up. All my students passed the course and I feel very proud about them and myself, i teach another Harmony Level 1 course and also got the priviledge to take the DSP with PD level III course, which is reserverd for teachers.

Are you guys getting where I am trying to go with this? Ofcourse certain topics are better suited to an online learning enviroment then others, and computer related topics will probably be the main dish during the startup fase. But I hope that people