 |
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.
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). [1] 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 [2] 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.[ citation needed ]
MIT's reasoning behind OCW was to "enhance human learning worldwide by the availability of a web of knowledge". [3] 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. [3]
According to the website of the OCW Consortium, an OCW project:
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.[ citation needed ]
In addition, edX is being used as an experimental research platform to support and evaluate a variety of other new concepts in online learning.
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. [5] The OCW platform SlideWiki [6] addresses these issues through a crowdsourcing approach.
Eduflic [7] - eduflic provides the platform and tools for everyone to access fully accredited online courses and degrees from top universities and industry leaders.
OER Africa has various OCW offerings available:
This listing is roughly in the order of adoption of OCW principles.
The following are not directly affiliated with a specific university:
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) [27] 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. [28] 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. [29] There have also been produced 148 comparative studies comparing MIT curriculum with Chinese curriculum using the MIT OpenCourseWare material. [30] 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. [31] 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. [32] The website has been offline since 2013. [33]
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 (精品课程) program. [34] 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, they produced 3862 courses at the national level by 746 universities. [35] According to the official website for the China Quality Course, the total number of the courses available online is more than 20,000. [36] These typically include syllabus, course notes, overheads, assignments, and in many cases audio or video of the entire lectures. [31] 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. [37]
The UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE) has been promoting Open Educational Resources (OER) in China. [38]
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. [39]
China Quality Course is a program launched by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China since April 8, 2003. [40] The website allows for ranking of courses. [41] From 2003 to 2010, 3862 courses had been produced at the national level by 746 universities. [42] According to the official website for the China Quality Course, the total number of courses available online is more than 20,000. [36] It lists no license or copyright on the website. [43]
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. [44]
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.
The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning 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 Human Resources 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.
All previously operational local chapters are now collectively offering courses under SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds). This is done through a platform that facilitates hosting of all the courses, taught in classrooms from Class 9 till post-graduation. All the courses are interactive and free of cost to any learner. Nine national co-coordinators are appointed, which also includes NPTEL, i.e., course work by Indian engineering institutes headed by IIT Madras. The courses hosted on SWAYAM are in four quadrants – video lecture, specially prepared reading material that can be downloaded and/ or printed, self-assessment tests through tests and quizzes and an online discussion forum. [45]
OpenCourseWare 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. [46] 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. [47]
In 2006, the OCW International Conference was held at Kyoto University wherein the Japanese OCW Association was reorganized into the Japan OCW Consortium. [46] 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. [46]
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. [47] 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. [48]
"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." [48]
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". [49] 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.
The "ocw.um.ac.ir (Persian : سامانه فیلم های آموزشی دانشگاه فردوسی مشهد)" is an online educational platform in Iran which provides free online courses from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran. The motto of the ocw.um.ac.ir is "Making Accessible Excellent High Quality Education For Every Iranian for Free". [50] ocw.um.ac.ir partners with Iran's top professors of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and so on. There is more than 200 courses available on ocw.um.ac.ir for free.
Led by the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan started organizing several open course plans, the main organization is named Taiwan open course and education consortium (Chinese: 台灣開放式課程暨教育聯盟). The plan attracted the National Taiwan University, National Chengchi University, National Taiwan Normal University, and others into the development of project. [51]
In the United Arab Emirates, a discussion, led by Dr. Linzi J. Kemp, American University of Sharjah, [54] 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.
The Open University of Israel is a member through its Pe'er initiative since 2008.
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. 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.
John W. Dower is an American author and historian. His 1999 book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the Bancroft Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association.
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.
Project 211 was a higher education development and sponsorship scheme of the Chinese central government for preparing approximately 100 universities for the 21st century, initiated in November 1995. There were 115 universities and colleges selected to be part of this program.
Project 985 was a higher education development and sponsorship scheme of the Chinese central government for creating world-class higher education institutions, initiated in May 1998. There were 39 universities selected to be part of this program.
An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.
The Open University of China (国家开放大学) is a national public university headquartered in Beijing, China. Established in 1978 by an executive order of Deng Xiaoping, the university is directly affiliated with and sponsored by the Ministry of Education of China.
The Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, was a web-based publication of educational material from a number of Tufts University courses, providing open sharing of free, searchable, high-quality course content to educators, students, and self-learners throughout the global community. The Tufts OCW initiative encouraged the publication and free exchange of course materials on the World Wide Web. First launched in June 2005, Tufts OCW provided materials with strong representation from Tufts' health sciences schools, some of which were equivalent to textbooks in depth. All materials on the Tufts OCW site were accessible and free of charge. As Tufts OCW is not a distance learning program, no registration, applications, prerequisites, or fees are required and no credit is granted. Tufts ended funding for its Open Courseware initiative in 2014, and content on the Tufts OCW web site was removed on June 30, 2018.
Open.Michigan is a collection of open initiatives and projects at the University of Michigan (U-M). Open.Michigan supports the open access and use of U-M resources for teaching, learning, and research. Open.Michigan promotes open content licensing and supports the reuse, redistribution, and remixing of educational materials for use by others worldwide. Some of the key efforts underway under the Open.Michigan umbrella include U-M's Open Educational Resources publishing activities, development of software tools that support creating open content, and various open content repositories.
The Yucai School Attached to Sichuan Chengdu No.7 High School (四川省成都市七中育才学校), commonly known as the Yucai Middle School, is a public middle school in Jinjiang, Chengdu, Sichuan, China, affiliated with Chengdu No.7 High School. Founded in 1997, the school is widely regarded as the best public middle school in Chengdu City and Sichuan Province.
FlexBook is a textbook authoring platform developed by the CK-12 Foundation launched in 2008, focused on textbooks for the K-12 market. Derived from the words "flexibility" and "textbook," a FlexBook allows users to produce and customize content by re-purposing educational content using different modules. FlexBooks can be designed to suit a learner's learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards.
China Quality Course is a program launched by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China since April 8, 2003.
This outline of open educational resources provides a way of navigating concepts and topics in relation to the open educational resources (OER) movement.
The Yokohama Overseas Chinese School (YOCS) is a Republic of China-oriented Chinese international school in Naka-ku, Yokohama, Japan. It serves elementary through senior high school. As of 2010 Shih Huei-chen is the president of the school.
Tianjin No. 20 High School is a public secondary school in Heping District in Tianjin.
Self-Taught Higher Education Examinations (STHEE) is a test for graduation of higher education and bachelor's degree in China. STHEE allows students to finish studies through self-study without going to school. It is practiced by National Education Examinations Authority (NEEA) of China. NEEA is an agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education.
The Foundation for International Cooperation in Higher Education of Taiwan was established in November 2005 by the Ministry of Education (Taiwan) and over 100 universities in Taiwan, and inaugurated formally in January 2006. Currently, the Foundation has a total of 119 member universities and colleges that are also its permanent member universities.
The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) promotes the awareness of open educational policies, practices, and resources. CCCOER is part of Open Education Global. CCCOER describes itself as a community of practice for open education, providing various resources, support, and opportunities for collaboration for learning, planning, and implementing successful open educational programs at community colleges and technical colleges. This support includes webinars, online advocacy events and conferences, a community email list, community blog, workshops and presentations throughout North America, as well as generally raising awareness of open education and supporting the needs of students and faculty at colleges adopting open educational resources and full degree pathways.
Compulsory education in the People's Republic of China details the mandatory implementation of education within the actual jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China.
China uses various methods to carry out nationwide anti-drug publicity and education and popularize drug prevention knowledge. The main purpose is to strengthen citizens' anti-drug awareness and improve citizens' awareness of the harm of drugs. A major task of comprehensive anti-drug publicity and education is to popularize drug prevention knowledge., reveal the serious harm of drug abuse to individuals, families, and society, strengthen the anti-drug awareness of the entire population, especially young people, educate the public security bureau to combat drug-related crimes, and build an effective mechanism for the whole society to prevent drug abuse. Minimize the proportion of new drug addicts. It can be said that the anti-drug publicity and education work with preventive education as the main task is the fundamental solution to the anti-drug work, and its effect kills two birds with one stone.
Media related to OpenCourseWare at Wikimedia Commons