OpenCourseWare

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

OpenCourseWare (OCW) is university material that is available for all to see and use, analogous to open source software; the materials are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license<ref>"Legal Notices"</ref>.

OpenCourseWare began with MIT OpenCourseWare, an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from MIT's undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the year 2007. MIT OpenCourseWare can be considered a large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course materials. The project was announced in 2001.

The main challenge in implementing this initiative has not been faculty resistance, but rather, the logistical challenges presented by determining ownership and obtaining publication permission for the massive amount of intellectual property items that are embedded in the course materials of MIT's faculty, in addition to the time and technical effort required to convert the educational materials to an online format.

In 2005, MIT OpenCourseWare and other leading OCW projects formed the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which seeks to extend the reach and impact of opencourseware materials, foster new opencoursewares and develop sustainable models for opencourseware publication.

1 OpenCourseWare projects
2 See also
3 External links
- 3.1 OpenCourseWare directories and search sites

[edit] OpenCourseWare projects

[edit] Asia

China Open Resource for Education (CORE) is a consortium of Chinese universities that has started to translate MIT-OCW courses into Chinese. They will also publicly publish their own Chinese courses in the coming years: CORE
Japan OCW Alliance contains materials from the top Japanese universities: Japan OCW Alliance
Taiwan: The Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS) translates the courses into traditional Chinese, through volunteers organized over the internet. The project is led by Fantasy Foundation's Lucifer Chu: OOPS
Taiwan: The China Economic Databases OpenCourseWare Project gathers course information from around the world on courses regarding China's economy China Economic Databases OCW
Thailand: Available at Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University (only engineering-related courses)
Vietnam: Fulbright Economics Teaching Program: FETP OpenCourseWare
The National Programme Of Technology Enabled Learning (NPTEL) being carried out by the Indian Institutes of Technology (all seven), Indian Institute of Science and other premier institutions in India is also on the same grounds. The main objective of NPTEL program is to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum based video and web courses.NPTEL

[edit] Europe

Universia.net is a consortium with more than 700 member universities in Spain, Portugal and Latin America that has translated many MIT courses into Spanish and Portuguese: Universia OpenCourseWare
École Ouverte (Open School), in French (ENS-LSH).
OpenLearn: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

[edit] North America

[edit] See also

Connexions - an open-content library of course materials developed by Rice University

[edit] External links

BBC news story: Learn for free online
Wired: MIT Everywhere
Opencourseware How To designed to share the experience, key decisions, and lessons learned that led to the implementation of MIT's OpenCourseWare project.
Open Courseware Consortium
Wharton OpenCourseWare -Knowledge Project - aimed to offer free access to business course materials for students, teachers, and self-learners.
Center for Open and Sustainable Learning
eduCommons - OpenCourseWare management system
Starting an OCW - How to start up an OCW at your institute