OpenCourseWare

OpenCourseWare

OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials in a virtual learning environment created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. Already in 1999 the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online in the context of its timms initiative.[1] The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at MIT in October 2002. Since then, a number of universities have created OCW projects, some of which have been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

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 a Creative Commons license.
  • does not typically provide certification or access to faculty.[2]

Contents

In 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 instituted the China Quality OpenCourseWare (精品课程) program, overseen by the Ministry of Education. This program accepts applications for university lectureres that wish to put their courses online, and gives grants of between $10-15,000 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”. In 2008, 1799 courses at the national level, over 5000 courses at the provincial level, and over 10,000 courses at the university level had been made available online. These typically include syllabus, course notes, overheads, assignments, and in many cases audio or video of the entire lectures[3]. 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[4].

At the same time, the China Open Resources for Education was set up as an NGO, with Fun-Den Wang (the head of IETF) as chairman, and the twelve universities as members. This organization organized volunteers to translate MIT OpenCourseWare into Chinese and to promote the idea of OpenCourseWare in China. At the end of 2007, 245 courses had been translated into Chinese, and these were used by 200 professors in courses involving a total of 8,000 students.

There have also been produced 148 comparative studies comparing MIT curriculum with Chinese curriculum using the MIT OpenCourseWare material[5]. CORE's offices are hosted within the China Central Radio and Television University, and they receive partial funding from the IETF and from the Hewlett foundation[6]. 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[7].

In Japan

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

Already in 2002, researchers from the National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) went to study the MIT OpenCourseWare, and this led to an OCW pilot plan with 50 courses at Tokyo Institute of Technology in September.[8] Later, in 2004, people from MIT gave an invited lecture about MIT OpenCourseWare at Tokyo Tech in July 2004, and after that, the first meeting of the Japan OCW Alliance was held with four Japanese universities. These 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.[9]

Subsequently, in 2006 the OCW International Conference was held at Kyoto University, and at that conference, the Japan OCW Association was reorganized into the Japan OCW Consortium.[10] By that time, they 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 had to out-source their production of OCW - while the University of Tokyo mainly employs students.[11]

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.[12] 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.[13]

“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.”[14]

See also

References

  1. ^ Tübinger Internet Multimedia Server
  2. ^ OCW Consortium Members
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ CAJ (2008) "Search for “精品课程” across all categories". China Academic Journals. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
  5. ^ CORE (2007). 2007 "Annual Report". CORE. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ CORE (2008) Open Education Conference 2008 held in April in Dalian, China. CORE. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
  8. ^ Kobayashi, T. & Kawafuchi, A. (2006a). "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.
  9. ^ Makoshi, N. (2006). "TokyoTech OCW WG and Japan OCW Consortium". Paper given to joint OECD/AIDE conference. Retrieved on December 19, 2008.
  10. ^ Kobayashi, T. & Kawafuchi, A. (2006a). "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.
  11. ^ Kobayashi, T. & Kawafuchi, A. (2006a). "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.
  12. ^ Makoshi, N. (2006). "TokyoTech OCW WG and Japan OCW Consortium". Paper given to joint OECD/AIDE conference. Retrieved on December 19, 2008.
  13. ^ Kobayashi, T. & Kawafuchi, A. (2006b). "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
  14. ^ Kobayashi, T. & Kawafuchi, A. (2006b). "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 (p. 12)

External links


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