Category: Being Open

All too often, efforts to promulgate the idea of a degree in fields related to space exploration remain within the NASA/aerospace company/collegiate circle. Efforts to truly reach out to unconventional communities including…

Under the Obama Administration there has been a big push for making government-developed and sponsored data and datasets more widely available than was previously the case. The online focus of this effort…

“Open source” is a term most often associated with software. According to a Wikipedia description: “Open source refers to a program in which the source code is available to the general public…

There has been an increasing amount of interest among scientists and engineers – as well as Congress and policy makers – that research conducted using public funding should be made openly available…

The cost of textbooks has become an issue in the past few years. Providing textbooks on tablet computers has cut costs somewhat, but in the traditional publishing business model, a significant mark-up…

In addition to using crowd sourcing to develop and expand course development, textbooks, software, and other materials, Space College will seek to work with citizen science organizations such as Moon Zoo and…

The term “citizen science” means different things to different people. To some it is simply a new word to describe amateur scientists engaging in data collection – possibly for use in traditional…

Crowd funding is an approach to raising funds for a project that solicits contributions from a wide range of donors – in varying levels – using online donation tools. Various platforms have…

Adopting an open source approach necessitates the use of certain standards. Whenever possible, materials produced via Space College participants will be open source and licensed for use via Creative Commons license format…