Rip Mix Learners- the Student-run OCW Project

Philipp Schmidt, via Sharing Nicely, featured a story about the exemplary sense of ownership and contribution exhibited by students in implementing an OCW initiative at UWC, the Rip Mix Learners project. Snippets:

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. After listening to the students share their stories yesterday, I must say, our smallest project turned out to be the most inspiring one.

• Students from Zimbabwe had been asking [a student from UWC who had been using the materials] 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.