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[[Category:OpenCourseWare| ]]
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[[Category:Education in China]]
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Revision as of 15:47, 12 September 2013

OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published gratis via the Internet.

History

The OpenCourseWare movement started in 1999 when the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online for its timms initiative.[1] The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in October 2002. The movement was soon reinforced by the launch of similar projects at Yale, the University of Michigan, and the University of California Berkeley.

MIT's reasoning behind OCW was to "enhance human learning worldwide by the availability of a web of knowledge".[2] MIT also stated that it would allow students (including, but not limited to its own) to become better prepared for classes so that they may be more engaged during a class. Since then, a number of universities have created OCW projects modeled after MIT's, some of which have been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation[2]

Principles

According to the website of the OCW Consortium, an OCW project:

  • is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.
  • is available for use and adaptation under an open license, such as certain Creative Commons licenses.
  • does not typically provide certification or access to faculty.[3]

edX

Main article: edX

Ten years after the US debut of OCW, in 2012 MIT and Harvard University announced the formation of edX, a massive open online course (MOOC) platform to offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge. This new initiative was based on MIT's "MITx" project, announced in 2011, and extends the concepts of OCW by offering more structured formal courses to online students, including in some cases the possibility of earning academic credit or certificates based on supervised examinations. A major new feature of the edX platform is the ability for students to interact with each other and with teachers in online forums. In some cases, students will help evaluate each other's work, and may even participate in some of the teaching online.

In addition, edX is being used as an experimental research platform to support and evaluate a variety of other new concepts in online learning.

Problems

A problem is that the creation and maintenance of comprehensive OCW requires substantial initial and ongoing investments of human labor. Effective translation into other languages and cultural contexts requires even more investment by knowledgeable personnel. This is one of the reasons why English is still the dominant language, and fewer open courseware options are available in other languages.[4] The OCW platform SlideWiki[5] addresses these issues through a crowd-sourcing approach.

Americas

Brazil

Mexico

USA

This listing is roughly in the order of adoption of OCW principles.

The following are not directly affiliated with a specific university:

Asia

China

OpenCourseWare originally initiated by MIT and the Hewlett Foundation, began movement in China in September, 2003, when MIT and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) joined together with the Beijing Jiaotong University to organize an OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing. As a result of this conference, 12 universities petitioned the government to institute a program of OpenCourseWare in China. This group included both some of the most prestigious universities in China, as well as the Central Radio and Television University, which is China’s central open university, covering more than 2 million students.

As a result of this petition, the Chinese government approved to institute the CORE(China Open Resources for Education)[10] to promote the OpenCourseWare in Chinese Universities, with Fun-Den Wang (the head of IETF) as chairman. The CORE is an NGO supported by Hewlett Foundation, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other fundations. According to CORE's website, it has nearly 100 Chinese universities as members, including the most prestigious universities in China, such as Tsinghua University, Peking University and Shanghai Jiaotong University.[11] This organization organized volunteers to translate foreign OpenCourseWare, mainly MIT OpenCourseWare into Chinese and to promote the application of OpenCourseWare in Chinese universities. At February, 2008, 347 courses had been translated into Chinese and 245 of them were used by 200 professors in courses involving a total of 8,000 students. It also tried to translate some Chinese courses into English, but the number is not too much and some are only title translated.[12] There have also been produced 148 comparative studies comparing MIT curriculum with Chinese curriculum using the MIT OpenCourseWare material.[13] CORE's offices are hosted within the China Central Radio and Television University, and they receive partial funding from the IETF and the Hewlett foundation.[14] They also host annual conferences on open education, and the 2008 conference was co-located with the international OpenCourseWare Consortium conference, which brought a large amount of foreign participants.[15]

But before the OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing and the establishment of CORE, at April 8, 2003, the Ministry of Education had published a policy to launch the China Quality Course (精品课程) program.[16] This program accepts applications for university lectureres that wish to put their courses online, and gives grants of between $10,000 – 15,000 CAD per course that is put online, and made available free of charge to the general public (ibid.). The most prestigious award is for the “national level CQOCW”, then there is “provincial level” and “school level”. From 2003 to 2010, there have produced 3862 courses at the national level by 746 universities.[17] According to the official website for the China Quality Course, the total number of the courses available online is more than 20,000.[18] These typically include syllabus, course notes, overheads, assignments, and in many cases audio or video of the entire lectures.[14] The scale of this project has also spurred a large research activity, and over 3,000 journal articles have been written in Chinese about the topic of OpenCourseWare.[19]

India

The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is a Government of India sponsored collaborative educational programme. By developing curriculum-based video and web courses the programme aims to enhance the quality of engineering education in India. It is being jointly carried out by 7 IITs and IISc Bangalore, and is funded by the Ministry of Human Resources Development of the Government of India.

Flexilearn is a very useful open course portal. It was initiated by Indira Gandhi National Open University, and apart from providing free course materials, flexilearn also provides opportunities to enroll oneself for a course and appear for exam conducted by university and thereby get certification.

Japan

OpenCourseWare originally initiated by MIT and the Hewlett Foundation, was introduced and adopted in Japan.

In 2002, researchers from the National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) studied the MIT OpenCourseWare, leading them to develop an OCW pilot plan with 50 courses at Tokyo Institute of Technology in September.[20] Later, in July 2004, MIT gave a lecture about MIT OpenCourseWare at Tokyo Tech that prompted the first meeting of the Japan OCW Alliance. The meeting was held with four Japanese universities that had mainly been recruited through the efforts of MIT professor Miyagawa, and his personal contacts. In one case, the connection was the former president of the University of Tokyo being an acquintance of Charles Vest, the former president of MIT.[21]

In 2006 the OCW International Conference was held at Kyoto University wherein the Japanese OCW Association was reorganized into the Japan OCW Consortium.[20] At that time, Japan OCW Consortium had over 600 courses; currently they have 18 university members, including the United Nations University (JOCW, n.d.). On Japanese university campuses there are few experts in content production, which makes it difficult to get support locally, and many of the universities have had to out-source their production of OCW. In example, the University of Tokyo has had to mainly employ students to create OCW.[20]

The motivation for joining the OCW movement seems to be to create positive change among Japanese universities, including modernizing presentation style among lecturers, as well as sharing learning material.[21] Japanese researchers have been particularly interested in the technical aspects of OCW, for example in creating semantic search engines. There is currently a growing interest for Open Educational Resources (OER) among Japanese universities, and more universities are expected to join the consortium.[22]

“In order to become an integral institution that contributes to OER, the JOCW Consortium needs to forge solidarity among the member universities and build a rational for OER on its own, different from that of MIT, which would support the international deployment of Japanese universities and also Japanese style e-Learning.”[22]

Europe

Germany

Netherlands

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Tübinger Internet Multimedia Server
  2. ^ a b Vest, C. M. (2004). "Why MIT decided to give away all its course materials via the Internet". The Chronicle of Higher Education, 50(21), B20. Retrieved from [1]
  3. ^ OCW Consortium Members
  4. ^ Tarasowa, Darya (2013). "CrowdLearn: Crowd-sourcing the Creation of Highly-structured E-Learning Content". 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education CSEDU 2013. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  5. ^ Auer, Sören. "First Public Beta of SlideWiki.org". Retrieved 22 February 2013.
  6. ^ [2]
  7. ^ udem.edu.mx - Acerca de OCW — UDEM OpenCourseWare, 2007-02-20
  8. ^ a b c d e f g ncl.ac.uk - Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses (Tamar Lewin), The Risks Digest Volume 26: Issue 81, 2012-05-04
  9. ^ Thrun on the Udacity model
  10. ^ http://www.core.org.cn
  11. ^ http://www.core.org.cn/cn/coredes.html Retrieved on April 11, 2013.
  12. ^ http://www.core.org.cn/en/Chin_Courses/
  13. ^ CORE (2007). 2007 "Annual Report". CORE. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
  14. ^ a b Wang, F. (2008). "Open Education Resources—Concept, Status and Frontier". 22nd Annual Conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities (AAOU). Tianjin, China. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
  15. ^ CORE (2008) Open Education Conference 2008 held in April in Dalian, China. CORE. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
  16. ^ http://www.moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/s3843/201010/109658.html
  17. ^ http://www.jingpinke.com/about/jinppinke
  18. ^ http://www.jingpinke.com/ Retrieved on April 11, 2013.
  19. ^ CAJ (2008) "Search for “精品课程” across all categories". China Academic Journals. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
  20. ^ a b c Kobayashi, T. & Kawafuchi, A. (2006). "Japan Open Course Ware Consortium (JOCW): A Case Study in Open Educational Resources Production and Use in Higher Education". OECD/CERI Report. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
  21. ^ a b Makoshi, N. (2006). "TokyoTech OCW WG and Japan OCW Consortium". Paper given to joint OECD/AIDE conference. Retrieved on December 19, 2008.
  22. ^ a b Kobayashi, T. & Kawafuchi, A. (2006). "Recent Moves in Promoting e-Learning in Japanese Higher Education with a Focus upon OER". Paper presented at European Association of Distance Teaching Universities, Tallinn, Estonia. Retrieved on December 18, 2008
  23. ^ tudelft.nl - TU Delft: 1. About TU Delft OpenCourseWare, read 2012-05-11
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