OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. The movement started in 1999 when the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online in the context of its timms initiative.[1] The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at MIT in October 2002. MIT's reasoning behind OCW was to "enhance human learning worldwide by the availability of a web of knowledge."[2] MIT also believes that it would allow students to become better prepared for classes so that they may be more engaged during the class. Since then, a number of universities have created OCW projects modeled after MIT's, some of which have been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation[3]
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OpenCourseWare originally initiated by MIT and the Hewlett Foundation, began movement in China in September, 2003, when MIT and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) joined together with the 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 both some of the most prestigious universities in China, as well as the Central Radio and Television University, which is China’s central open university, covering more than 2 million students.
As a result of this petition, the Chinese government instituted the China Quality OpenCourseWare (精品课程) program, overseen by the Ministry of Education. This program accepts applications for university lectureres that wish to put their courses online, and gives grants of between $10–15,000 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”. In 2008, 1799 courses at the national level, over 5000 courses at the provincial level, and over 10,000 courses at the university level had been made available online. These typically include syllabus, course notes, overheads, assignments, and in many cases audio or video of the entire lectures.[4] 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.[5]
At the same time, the China Open Resources for Education was set up as an NGO, with Fun-Den Wang (the head of IETF) as chairman, and the twelve universities as members. This organization organized volunteers to translate MIT OpenCourseWare into Chinese and to promote the idea of OpenCourseWare in China. At the end of 2007, 245 courses had been translated into Chinese, and these were used by 200 professors in courses involving a total of 8,000 students.
There have also been produced 148 comparative studies comparing MIT curriculum with Chinese curriculum using the MIT OpenCourseWare material.[6] CORE's offices are hosted within the China Central Radio and Television University, and they receive partial funding from the IETF and from the Hewlett foundation.[4] 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.[7]
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.[8] 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 acquintance of Charles Vest, the former president of MIT.[9]
In 2006 the OCW International Conference was held at Kyoto University wherein the Japanese OCW Association was reorganized into the Japan OCW Consortium.[8] 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 out-source their production of OCW. In example, the University of Tokyo has had to mainly employ students to create OCW.[8]
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.[9] 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.[10]
“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.”[10]