Introduction to the Psychology mOOC (mixable Open Online Course)

Photo credit: flickr/jasoneppink Links to an external site.

Welcome to the Introductory Psychology mixable Open Online Course (mOOC)

Note to Teachers and Open Education Advocates:

This course is being created by a wide range of professionals.

First and foremost, it uses the Open Yale Courses videos of Paul Bloom's course Links to an external site. as its backbone. We are very thankful to both Yale and the Hewlett Foundation for providing these materials free for non-commercial reuse. These pieces are under a CC-NC-SA license, and can be reused in accordance with that. The OYC definition of non-commercial is here Links to an external site.. 

Second, the majority of the text is provided by Charles Stangor's excellent Introductory Psychology book, issued by Flat World Knowledge. This, too, is released under a CC-NC-SA license. [We encourage all students to buy a Flat World Knowledge Study Pass to this text to get the most out of the course.]

Third, the in-video questions, quizzes, assignments, and suggested in-class activities have been designed by a wide array of volunteers. The materials created are (again) available under a CC-NC-SA license. 

If there is a big idea behind this course, it is that the killer feature of MOOCs is openness, and that the right to remix creates powerful synergies. Unlike most other xMOOCs currently available, you are free to use this in your (non-profit) class however you want.

In other words, whatever this thing is -- you have permission to make it better. The "mixable" is the idea that our output is another person's input. We took videos, added questions and activities and made a course. You might wrap this course, or pare it down, or add discussion boards, or record supplemental video.  You might export it and run it yourself, or integrate the modules into your own instruction. You might run it as a MOOC, as a facilitator, even if you didn't write a word of it (again, due to the use of OYC and Flat World content, you may not charge for admission into the mOOC). You might fix the horrible questions I wrote.

You'll feed that remix forward to someone else, they will improve it even more, and by this process civilization advances. It's part of what that first "O" in MOOC used to mean. It's what it still can mean. 

In any case, enjoy! And if you do help out, PLEASE add your name to the course credits below!