The OpenCourseWare movement started in 1999 when the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online for its timms initiative (Tübinger Internet Multimedia Server). The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University in October 2002. The movement was soon reinforced by the launch of similar projects at Yale, Utah State University, 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".
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, some of which have been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
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.
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. The OCW platform SlideWiki addresses these issues through a crowdsourcing approach.
Americas
Colombia
- Universidad Icesi, OpenCourseWare de la Universidad Icesi
Brazil
Mexico
United States
This listing is roughly in the order of adoption of OCW principles.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2002
- Carnegie Mellon University, 2002
- University of California, Berkeley
- Stanford University
- Princeton University
- University of Pennsylvania
- University of Michigan
- Harvard University
- Yale University
- Caltech
- Johns Hopkins University
- University of California, Irvine
The following are not directly affiliated with a specific university:
- Academic Earth - privately owned
- Khan Academy - non-profit
- CosmoLearning.org - non-profit
- Students Circle Network - peer to peer
- Coursera - venture capital financed
- Udacity - venture capital financed
- edX - non-profit
- iversity - mixed (free and paid)
Asia
China
OpenCourseWare, originally initiated by MIT and the Hewlett Foundation, came to China in September, 2003, when MIT and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) joined together with 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 some of the most prestigious universities in
China, as well as the Central Radio and Television University, which is China’s central open university, with more than 2 million students.
As a result of this petition, the Chinese government instituted the CORE (China Open Resources for Education) 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 foundations. 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.
This organization organized volunteers to translate foreign
OpenCourseWare, mainly MIT OpenCourseWare into Chinese and to promote
the application of OpenCourseWare in Chinese universities. In 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.
There have also been produced 148 comparative studies comparing MIT
curriculum with Chinese curriculum using the MIT OpenCourseWare
material.
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.
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.[23] The website has been offline since 2013.
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. This program accepts applications for university lecturers 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.
According to the official website for the China Quality Course, the
total number of the courses available online is more than 20,000.
These typically include syllabus, course notes, overheads, assignments,
and in many cases audio or video of the entire lectures.
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.
The UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE) has been promoting Open Educational Resources (OER) in China.
Cul-studies.com provides culture studies and teaching in China
under a Creative commons license run by Contemporary Culture Studies
(CCCS) of the Shanghai University.
Guoxue is working on the digitization and promotion of ancient Chinese books.
The National Science Library Institutional Repository contains journals and conference proceedings.
The Social Learn Lab Community contains creative commons materials. Its wiki is very inactive.
The Songshuhui Community promotes science in china under the creative commons.
The Chinese journal of lung cancer is published under a creative commons license.
China Quality Course
China Quality Course is a program launched by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China since April 8, 2003.
The website allows for ranking of courses. From 2003 to 2010, 3862 courses had been produced at the national level by 746 universities. According to the official website for the China Quality Course, the total number of courses available online is more than 20,000.
It lists no license or copyright on the website.
Malaysia
University
of Malaya (UM) is the foremost and premier Research University (RU) in
Malaysia. It is a multidisciplinary RU that has more than 27,000
students and 1700 academic staff with 17 faculties and research centres
that covers the whole spectrum of learning from the Arts, Sciences and
Humanities. The university's beginning at the Kuala Lumpur campus dates
back to 1959 and thus far has a huge alumni of over 100,000, among them
renowned and illustrious personalities and leaders in various fields. http://www.oeconsortium.org/members/view/427/
Pakistan
The Virtual University
(Urdu:ورچوئل یونیورسٹی; Vu), is a public university located in urban
area of Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. Its additional campus is also located
in residential area of Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan.
Established in 2002 by the Government of Pakistan to promote
distance education in modern information and communication sciences as
its primary objectives, the university is noted for its online lectures
and broadcasting rigorous programs regardless of their students'
physical locations. The university offers undergraduate and
post-graduate courses in business administration, economics, computer
science, and information technology. Due to its heavy reliance on
serving lectures through the internet, Pakistani students residing
overseas in several other countries of the region are also enrolled in
the University's programs.
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.
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 acquaintance of Charles Vest, the former president of MIT.
In 2006, the OCW International Conference was held at Kyoto University wherein the Japanese OCW Association was reorganized into the Japan OCW Consortium. 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 outsource their production of OCW.
In example, the University of Tokyo has had to mainly employ students
to create OCW.
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.
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.
“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.”
Iran
The "Maktabkhooneh (Persian: مکتب خونه)" is an online educational platform in Iran
which provides free online courses from universities in Iran. The motto
of the Maktab-Khooneh is "Making Accessible Excellent High Quality
Education For Every Iranian for Free". Maktabkhooneh partners with Iran's top universities, mostly Sharif University of Technology, University of Tehran, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran University of Medical Sciences and so on. There is more than 200 courses available on Maktabkhooneh for free.
Taiwan
Led by the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan started organizing several open course plans, the main organization is named Taiwan open course consortium (kanji:台灣開放式課程聯盟). The plan attracted the National Taiwan University, National Chengchi University, National Taiwan Normal University, and others into the development of project.
Europe
Germany
- University of Tübingen, 1999
- SlideWiki.org (developed at University of Leipzig)
France
- France Université Numérique: The Mooc portal for French Universities, founded in 2013 with state support.
Netherlands
Romania
Turkey
United Kingdom
- OpenLearn, the free learning portal developed by The Open University, UK.
Middle East
In the United Arab Emirates, a discussion, led by Dr. Linzi J. Kemp, American University of Sharjah,
has begun about sharing teaching and learning materials (‘open course
ware’) through a community of educators and practitioners in the GCC.
There is growing availability of high quality and free open access
materials shared between universities e.g. MIT (USA). Resource sharing
also takes place on the ‘Open University (UK), OpenLearn’ platform. Kemp
(2013) proposes that teaching and learning will be enhanced when
teachers across institutions of higher education work together to bring
their shared knowledge into classrooms. Furthermore, when the platform
is opened up to include practitioners - e.g. employers - then the
relationship with the industry will further ensure that the teaching and
learning is available and beneficial for a wider community.
