Web Curriculum

Description

What is the proposal?

Encourage and produce curriculum materials for use in educational institution. W3C should provide a permanent forum for the work of the Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group.

Rationale

What is the benefit for the organization in implementing this recommendation?

In order to foster the deployment of the universal open platform for the Web, it is important to educate the community, especially students.

Cost

What (if any) is the incremental cost to W3C to implement the recommendation? Is there a natural way to diminish the cost by refocusing existing people (i.e. reprioritization)?

The cost is likely to be minimal, given the proposal from OWEA. This is assuming that no revision of the W3C Membership agreement is necessary. Some startup cost includes one FTE for one year only, to get it going until it gets pay for by government institution.

Note that the certification program depends on this proposal.

The Task Force strongly advises in favor of hiring or partnering with recognized experts in the domain in order to implement this proposal.

Financial benefit

What (if any) income arises to W3C as a consequence of the proposal?

The proposal is intended to be auto-financed.

Decision body

What is the most natural place for the proposal to be approved/decided? Director? CEO? W3M? AB? AC? other?

W3C Headquarters

Status and schedule

What is the level of maturity of the proposal. Can it be thought of as reasonably complete? If it is immature, what is the schedule to complete the proposal?

This proposal is mature.

Intellectual Property Concerns

Are there any special Intellectual Property Concerns if W3C were to implement this proposal?

To be explored but unlikely.

Finance Discussion

A key element of our efforts is to look at financial implications for W3C over a 4-5 year period. When providing cost data above, it is useful to provide a 5 year view as well (assuming that it is a recurring activity). During the task force, as we come together on which recommendations are the best ones, we also need to keep an eye on the aggregate implications for finance.

Details for Further Consideration

Here are a list of questions that need to be answered to operationalize the proposal:

• What is the long-term maintainability of this effort, with updating of materials?
• What would be the start-up costs?
• Who would be the right person to hire to oversee this?
  • What qualifications?
  • What skills?
  • What would their role and responsibility be?
  • Criteria for success?
    • Year 1?
    • Year 2?
    • Year 3?
  • Write up a job posting as an exercise
• Projected timeline?
• Purpose of WebCraft Curriculum effort?
  • educational institutions?
  • self-teaching tutorials?
  • certification / training?
• Specific demonstration of interest?
  • Governments? (grant funding?) Which ones?
    • Consider National Science Foundation research grants, which may have educational component
  • Teaching institutions? Which ones?
• Emphasis on different aspects of undertaking?
  • structure
  • pedagogical methodology
  • fundraising
• Who would be the W3C hiring manager for this?
• Relationship to MIT Open Course Ware? Might well-received at MIT
• How would this impact other W3C work?
  • If on-line training has W3C branding, the Team Contacts for each technology that is represented may feel substantive impact on their time, if only to review and comment on the content; how would this be addressed?