Type of site | Social networking service |
---|---|
Founded | 2010 |
Headquarters | Kyrenia, Northern Cyprus |
Founder(s) | Gossy Ukanwoke |
Key people | Samora Reid, CEO Chika Uwazie, VP of Channels Amby Uche, Products Development |
Students Circle Network was a global social networking service for university and secondary school students that provided over 10,400 academic courses of various levels from over 200 OpenCourseWare members worldwide, as well as study groups in various academic disciplines with online chat, and social-network games. [1] The platform was an OpenCourseWare consortium member. [2]
The platform was free to students studying business, computing, engineering, sciences and humanities. It had members from over 120 countries and 200 universities as well as many secondary schools. Membership was open to students, researchers, and teachers. It was self-funded. [3]
Users were able to create a "something akin to a Facebook profile for [their] academic interests". [4]
The network was started as a personal project of Gospel "Gossy" Ukanwoke, in Kyrenia, Northern Cyprus, in June 2010, as a collaboration tool for students at Girne American University, where he was studying. [5] [6]
Gossy Ukanwoke was referred to as the Mark Zuckerberg of Nigeria [7] [8] [9] and as "Africa's top technology entrepreneur". [10]
In December 2010, the platform was launched worldwide and reached 1 million visits. By January 2011, it reached 2 million visits and was averaging over 50,000 visits daily. [11]
In April 2012, Gossy Ukanwoke resigned from active management of the platform to focus on the creation of Beni American University, with a goal of creating affordable education in Africa. [12] [13] [14]
In 2012, Students Circle Network was a finalist at the Future Africa Awards in the Innovation in Education Category. [15]
Students Circle Network won the People's Choice Award from Study.com. [16]
In addition to the OpenCourseWare member universities, Students Circle Network partnered with non-OpenCourseWare member universities, including:
MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. The project was announced on April 4, 2001, and uses Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The program was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. Currently, MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors. The initiative inspired a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
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Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.
Girne American University is a non-profit university in Girne, a city in Northern Cyprus. The university was founded in 1985 by Mr Serhat Akpinar as an institution of American-style higher education. It part of YÖDAK, the higher education coordinating council of Northern Cyprus and YÖK, its Turkish parallel.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.
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