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.
History 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 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 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".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. 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.
Africa
OER Africa OER Africa has various OCW offerings available:
The Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) Mathematics to assist teachers in their understanding upper primary and middle school maths as well as teaching issues relating to mathematical content The ACE School Leadership and Management aimed at empowering school leaders to lead and manage schools effectively The Household Food Security Programme aims to train household food security facilitators to work as change agents in the areas of agriculture, food and nutrition, focusing on households within communities The Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning (PEBL) assists university partners across East Africa to develop courses that can be offered by participant universities through blended learning The Agshare II project, a collaboration between three HEIs in Ethiopia and Uganda on agricultural issues, lists a number of courseware documents under the list of Resources, while Communication Skills courseware developed by the University of Malawi is available at the IADP-SADC Digital Resources Project
Americas Colombia Universidad Icesi, OpenCourseWare de la Universidad Icesi
Brazil Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV Online) Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Mexico Universidad de Monterrey, 2007 Universidad Anáhuac México Norte, 2010
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 Coursetexts – non-profit Khan Academy – non-profit Students Circle Network – peer to peer Coursera – venture capital financedncl.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 Udacity – venture capital financed edX – acquired by 2U 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, 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 students.
As a result of this petition, the Chinese government instituted the CORE (China Open Resources for Education) to promote OpenCourseWare in Chinese Universities, with Fun-Den Wang (the head of IETF) as chairman. The CORE is an NGO supported by the Hewlett Foundation, 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 (2007). 2007 "Annual Report" . CORE. Retrieved on December 18, 2008. 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.CORE (2008) Open Education Conference 2008 held in April in Dalian, China . CORE. Retrieved on December 18, 2008. The website has been offline since 2013.
But before the OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing and the establishment of CORE, on April 8, 2003, the Ministry of Education had published a policy to launch the China Quality Course () program. This program accepts applications for university lecturers that wish to put their courses online, and gives grants of between 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, they 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.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. 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.CAJ (2008) "Search for “精品课程” across all categories". China Academic Journals. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
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.
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 has graduated over 100,000 people, including leaders in various fields.
Pakistan The Virtual University (Urdu: ; 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 program. By developing curriculum-based video and web courses, the program 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 Education (previously Ministry of Human Resource Development) of the Government of India.
Flexilearn is an open course portal. It was initiated by Indira Gandhi National Open University, and apart from providing free course materials, allows students to appear for the requisite exam conducted by the university and receive certification.