John Crooks of UC Irvine Receives Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence

John Crooks of UC Irvine Receives Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence

Distinction is Given by OpenCourseWare Consortium at Annual Global Conference

John Crooks, M.F.A., lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, has been honored as a recipient of the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s (OCW Consortium) inaugural Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence (ACE awards). Crooks’ course, titled “Introduction to Pitch Systems in Tonal Music” received the award in the video and multimedia courseware category. Recipients of the ACE awards were honored at the recent OCW Consortium global conference in Cambridge, Mass.

“UC Irvine is delighted to have one of its lecturers recognized for their contributions to the OpenCourseWare movement,” said Larry Cooperman, director of UC Irvine’s OpenCourseWare project. “OpenCourseWare initiatives around the world are creating a significant impact on the future of higher education, and through contributions such as the courses offered by John Crooks, UC Irvine can play a monumental role in creating equal, open accessibility to high quality educational materials.”

The courseware awards were selected by a committee populated from the OCW Consortium membership. All “video and multimedia” winners were recognized for the integration of substantial video and/or multimedia elements into the course. Crooks’ course offers a ten part series of video lecture/presentations covering properties of tonality and circulating pitch systems in addition to audio examples and sound visualization. The course is currently used by music students UC Irvine and was developed especially for publication via the University’s OpenCourseWare.

“I am honored to have received recognition from the OCW Consortium for my course,” said Crooks. “The site serves as a testament to UC Irvine’s commitment to the open access of educational materials, which I hope to advance through the development of additional OCW materials and courses.”

Crooks is a 2009 graduate of UC Irvine’s M.F.A. program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology. An active bassist and composer, Crooks has used OpenCourseWare materials for his own education. In addition to his teaching work at UC Irvine he teaches innovative music technology, music theory, and ensemble courses for high school students in collaboration with the COSMOS-UCI summer program and String Project Los Angeles.

ABOUT UC IRVINE’S OPENCOURSEWARE INITIATIVE: The University of California, Irvine was the first University of California campus—and West Coast University—to join the OCW Consortium. UC Irvine’s membership in the OCW Consortium is consistent with its public- and land-grant missions and its desire to play a significant role in contributing to the social welfare of the state, the nation and the world. Open educational resources (OER) showcase the University’s high quality education and makes courses and course materials free for everyone in the world. UC Irvine’s OCW is a large-scale, Web-based resource that houses educational assets that are discoverable, searchable, modifiable, and, best of all, free and easily available. Through the OCW movement, UC Irvine provides University-quality courses and learning assets to populations of self-learners that are underserved and in many cases, unable to participate in formal education at a university. This site also offers access to UC Irvine’s online continuing education offerings. For more information about UC Irvine’s OCW initiative, visit http://ocw.uci.edu/ or e-mail ocw@unx.uci.edu.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE: Founded in 1965, UCI is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Led by Chancellor Michael Drake since 2005, UCI is among the most dynamic campuses in the University of California system, with nearly 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 1,100 faculty and 9,000 staff. Orange County’s largest employer, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $4.2 billion. For more UCI news, visit www.today.uci.edu.

for University of California, Irvine
Vivian C. Slater, 714.573.0899 x 235
vivian@echomediapr.com