Serendipity35

Back in August, 2007, I posted about a recent grant driven initiative (the Innovative Partnership Institute) that was being managed by my group at NJIT.  At that time we were  developing the curriculum for training in the Financial Services industry (the IPI Financial) and actively planning the second and third parts of the open-curriculum initiative: the production of complete portable curriculum training targeted at the pharmaceutical (IPI PharmaBio) and information technology (IPI IT) segments of industry.

On September 30th, the curricula for all three segments of the Innovative Partnership Institute were published and made available for free public access.  The courses inside each curiculum archive support high school, junior college and 4 year college training programs.  Each archive and included course are designed to function as standalone, portable units of instruction.  The material is designed to be installed  both on individuall workstation computers and/or network servers while remaining unchanged in form or content regardless of the delivery method.  Depending on which education level being taught, the courses contain Teacher and Student Guides, portable document format resources, presentation media (such as PowerPoint), multimedia files, Flash movies and html content.  Links to external references and websites are kept in separate documentation sections so that the course materials can be kept current as the World Wide Web evolves and changes over time.

The partners participating in and contributing to the development of these free public instructional resources were the Newark Alliance, Camden County College, Cook College of Rutgers University and NJIT.  One of the fundamental requirements of the material that these institutes produced was the free avaiability of not only the course materials but also the free availability of the software required to display the course contents. While some of the course archives include proprietary format files such as Microsoft Office's PowerPoint and Word (both .doc and docx files), the documentation for the courses include links to open source programs (such as OpenOffice) that are freely available for download and allow the same access to the course material as commercially available software.

Under a continuing grant, more self-contained, portable and freely accessible courses are actively being developed this Autumn for a scheduled release in the Spring of 2009 that are also targeted at industry-specific job training.  The goal of this entire initiative is to better prepare the emerging workforce at getting and retaining jobs in traditional and emerging industries.  What success these initiatives actually achieve remains to be seen.