About Us

Larry Cooperman
Director, UCI OpenCourseWare

Larry Cooperman is the President of the Board of Directors of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and an international consultant on open education. He has been an invited speaker at a UNESCO/MofE conference in Brazil, at TEDx in Medellin, Colombia, at the Korea OCW Consortium conference, at the plenary debate on OER at eLearning Africa, and others. He is a member of the boards of directors of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and the African Virtual University and leads the UC-Haiti Initiative's distance learning activities. Many organizations intend to adopt open education as a guiding principle, but face a series of obstacles. Cooperman's activity, principally in Africa and Latin America, has served to assist organizations and governments to take advantage of open education repositories, projects, and websites.

Examples:

1. African Virtual University. Larry has submitted a draft policy for the functioning of its open education repository OER@AVU. The issue of the repository is an important one. It has to balance the AVU's capacity-building emphasis, e.g. reliance on the work of African academics, with a need to expand it from its origins as the repository of resources created solely by the AVU. Cooperman has proposed a series of board policies calling for a curated approach to repository building, combined with opening the repository to African academics both in sub-Saharan Africa as well as the entire African academic diaspora.
2. SENA, Colombia. Larry met with the Vice-Minister of Education, and the senior advisor to President Santos on social prosperity, and with one of four national directors of SENA (National Learning Service) to attempt to define an open education project around Food Security. Some 35 universities attended a breakfast talk by Cooperman and Carolina Botero at the height of this activity.
3. UNILAB, Brazil. UNILAB is a project launched by former Cooperman Lula to develop an Afro-Brazilian/African multinational university. Larry was invited by Rector Paolo Speller to help define what "openness" would mean for its faculty. UNILAB subsequently became a formal partner of the African Virtual University through an agreement authored by Cooperman.
4. Universite de l'Etat d'Haiti. Cooperman wrote a report on distance learning readiness following a weeklong assessment trip for the UC-Haiti Initiative in September. While the trip intended to primarily address distance learning, Cooperman met with the Chancellor and others to urge the adoption of open education as a modality by which UEH could better serve all of Haiti and not just its matriculated students. His report has been translated to French and distributed in Haiti to key personnel.
5. Open Education Week. Cooperman developed a scheduled webcast capability in which 144 hours of continuous programming was shown throughout the week, with locale-adapted time schedules.

Selected Presentations

• Cooperman, L, (2013, May 9) "What We Don't Know: Examining our assumptions on open education." 2013 OpenCourseWare Consortium Global Conference. Bali, Indonesia.
• Cooperman, L. (2013, January 22) "Re-Examining Our Assumptions: OCW in the Year of the MOOC." Conference of the Asia Regional OpenCourseWare Consortium (AROOC). Bangkok, Thailand
• Cooperman, L. (2011, November 10.) UNESCO/MofE Conference. Joao Pessoa, Brazil.
• Cooperman, L. (2011, November 4). Korea OCWC 2011, Seoul, Korea.
• Cooperman, L. (2011, June 16). “The Future is Open,” presented at the Technology, Entertainment, Design community event TEDx Conference in Medellin, Columbia.
• Cooperman, L. (2011, May 27). “Open Learning Debate,” presented at E-Learning Africa.” Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.
• Cooperman, L. (2012, February 23) “Building the Global Open Education Infrastructure,” presented at the 1st International Conference on Open and Distance Learning, Manila, Philippines.
• Cooperman, L. (2012, March 7) “Educating Everyone: What Next for Open Education,” presented at SXSW.EDU Conference

Upcoming Presentations

• African Virtual University, Nairobi, Kenya. "OER, OCW and MOOCs." May 17-20, 2013
• EducaVirtual, Conference of the Organization of American States, Medellin, Colombia. June 19, 2013
• 5th Asia Regional OperCourseWare and Open Education Conference (AROOC 2013) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. October 28-29, 2013
• AVU 1st International Conference on Open and Distance Education, Nairobi, Kenya (November 22, 2013)