CFP: American Philosophical Association Pacific Division 2014 Meeting

Call for panel proposals
(please feel free to distribute wherever you think relevant)

The APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy invites proposals for a panel on teaching open, online (or blended online/face-to-face) courses in philosophy at the Pacific Division meeting of the APA, April 16-20, in San Diego, California, U.S.A.

Panel presentations could be about teaching "MOOCs," or "massive" open online courses in philosophy, but need not be limited to that; they could be about teaching any course in philosophy that is open to participants outside those taking the course for credit (however small). Some of these might be run through companies such as Coursera, Udacity or EdX, and others might be run more informally, or through an institution without affiliation to such a third party. Courses discussed could be completely online, or have some online and some face-to-face components. We invite presentations that discuss experiences teaching such courses, or plans to teach such courses (ideally the design would be largely complete by the time of the presentation), or potential or actual problems, drawbacks to teaching such courses in philosophy.

Though the above is our primary interest, we will also consider panel presentations that discuss courses that make significant use of or provide open educational resources (OER) for others to use. OER can be defined as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge" (Hewlett Foundation: http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education-program/open-educational-resources).

Another way of thinking about OER is as "open content," such as defined by David Wiley here: http://opencontent.org/definition/ According to Wiley, content is "open" to the degree that it allows for four "R's":

• Reuse - the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content)
• 
  Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• 
  Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• 
  Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

So we will consider proposals discussing courses that use open content provided by others, and/or that provide it for others to use.

Both individual submissions as well as proposals for several panelists together are welcome. Please send a title, an abstract of no more than 500 words, and your name, and email address to [email protected]. Deadline is Nov. 1, 2013 (time in N. America). (Yes, a very tight deadline! Apologies for that.)