The OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement has helped some of the world's best universities offer teaching, learning and research resources by publishing their faculty's course materials online and making them available free of charge. Despite the fact that most OCW projects are not technology projects, all of the OCW rely on web-based technologies to facilitate the open sharing of knowledge.
Educators are embracing new types of social media to take OCW to the next level and build a community around their virtual classroom.In addition, a large amount of OCW is being updated to include new multimedia capabilities and enhanced functionality. The purpose is to replicate class and lab experiences interactively online using visual technologies.
MIT's recent
evaluation report of its OCW collection revealed that educators
were accessing OERs to support their course planning and
preparation and to enhance their personal knowledge (Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 2006).
According to the MIT report, 96 percent of these educators indicated that MIT's open courseware (OCW) collection has or will help to improve their courses. Students and self-learners, representing the largest number of OCW users, accessed the collection for various reasons, including planning future studies, complementing their existing courses, or improving their personal knowledge.
Utah State University is another one of several universities providing free and open content course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world through the OCW initiative as well as connecting educators, OCW content providers and learning communities with each other through the Center for Open Sustanable Learning (COSL) think tank and annual conference.
In April 2008, Yale University announced that it would join the OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement and offering free courses through Open Yale Courses that anyone in the world is free to participate.
Seven departments (astronomy, English, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology and religious studies) at Yale are among the first at the university to offer classes via the Open Yale Courses program.
The Open Yale Courses have been funded and supported through grants from the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation, as well as the Yale Center for Media and Instruction. Open Yale Courses have also integrated Creative Commons licensing into their course materials.
|
OPENCOURSEWARE (OCW) |
|
|---|---|
| ORGANIZATION |
RESOURCES |
| Utah
State University OCW |
Provides courses from across all disciplines at Utah State
University curriculum. |
| CORE is committed to providing Chinese universities with free
and easy access to global open educational resources. |
|
| Spearheading the development of EU Open Course Ware in the
EU. |
|
| The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative
efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and
governmental organizations from around the world that will help
build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and
multimedia content. |
|
| MIT OCW | Contains 1700 courses from across the MIT curriculum. |
|
OPEN SOURCE COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (CMS) |
|
|---|---|
| ORGNISATION | RESOURCES |
| Moodle | Open source CMS for educators who want to create online
courses. |
| Plone | Open source CMS platform and collaboration tool. |
| Boddington | Open source Virtual Learning Environment to support teaching,
learning and research. |
| Elgg | Open source CMS/ social platform. |
| Yahoo! For Teachers | Online tool for educators to create, publish and share lessons
using search widget called "Gobbler." |
| Leonardo Da Vinci Project | EU initiative for lifelong learning. |
| Université Catholique de Louvain > Caroline | This software is a web-based course management system that
allows students to download course materials onto smart phones. |
| Docebo | Open source CMS with community features (forums, chat). |
It's About People, Not Technology
In the end, the solution to the issue of digital inclusion is one built around a symbiotic relationship between those who back the initiative, working together to empower educators to optimise global open education and, in the process, bridging the technological, community and content divide.
Post Comments