Washington -- When the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) announced in 2001 that it was planning
to offer free online access to educational materials from
hundreds of its course offerings, the university in Cambridge
said it hoped its OpenCourseWare (OCW) Web site would inspire
other educational institutions to help create a “worldwide
web of knowledge that will benefit humanity.”
Judging by the enthusiastic worldwide response
to MIT’s gesture, the university appears five years
later to be leading an international movement that is affecting
education on every continent. Twelve U.S. educational institutions
currently are participating in what has become an international
consortium comprising more than 50 institutions in Africa,
Asia, Europe and South America.
"OpenCourseWare expresses in an immediate
and far-reaching way MIT's goal of advancing education around
the world,” MIT President Susan Hockfield said in
a statement featured on the university’s OCW Web site.
“Through MIT OCW, educators and students everywhere
can benefit from the academic activities of our faculty
and join a global learning community in which knowledge
and ideas are shared openly and freely for the benefit of
all."
MIT remains the leader of the OCW movement,
offering anyone in the world free and open access to the
educational materials from more than 1,500 courses. These
materials include course syllabi, reading lists, PowerPoint
presentations, problem sets and solutions, lecture notes,
exams and in some cases videotaped lectures. MIT says it
plans to include materials from 1,800 courses by the year
2008.
But other U.S. universities have joined
the OCW movement as well, usually offering something for
which the school is noted rather than repeating offerings
already available from MIT.
Yale University in Connecticut recently
announced that it would be making available on the Internet
videotapes of lectures from seven undergraduate liberal
arts courses with transcriptions into several languages.
If all goes well, Yale intends to add additional courses
each year.
The University of Notre Dame in Indiana
announced in September that it was making available eight
courses and would eventually offer 30, each of them dealing
with understanding “the spiritual and moral aspects
of life, the human condition, the search for meaning, and
conflict resolution.”
The Johns Hopkins University in Maryland
features courses from its Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Tufts University in Massachusetts has made
available a selection of courses in medicine, dentistry,
veterinary medicine, nutrition science and the liberal arts,
as well as a course on international multilateral negotiation
created by Tuft’s Fletcher School.
The OCW-affiliate organizations tend to
have a regional or single country focus. The eGranary Digital
Library, for example, places Web resources, including OCW
offerings, on a server on African university campuses that
have little or no Internet connectivity. A nonprofit, largely
volunteer service based at the University of Iowa in Iowa
City, the eGranary Digital Library manually updates its
library at least twice each year on dozens of African campus
intranets.
WHO USES OPEN COURSEWARE?
MIT says that the users of its OCW materials
come from 215 countries, territories and city-states around
the world. In 2005, it had 8.5 million visits to its OCW
content, a 56 percent increase over the previous year. Most
of its users (61 percent) were from outside the United States
-- 22 percent from East Asia, 15 percent from Western Europe,
6 percent from South Asia, 5 percent from Latin America
and 13 percent from other regions.
Johns Hopkins’ OCW site, launched
just one year ago, now receives over 70,000 page views a
month from more than 110 countries, with 38 percent of the
site's visitors coming from outside the United States, the
university says.
In surveying its users, MIT found that 49
percent of its OCW visitors characterized themselves as
“self-learners,” 32 percent as students and
16 percent as educators. Among the educators, 62 percent
said they combined materials from MIT’s OCW with other
content, while 38 percent said they adapted course syllabi
and 26 percent said they adapted assignments or exams.
MIT has found that more than a third of
its own students use OCW to complement courses they are
taking. Other users are educators interested in using MIT’s
OCW to improve their own teaching. Still others are self-learners
who use MIT OCW to enhance personal knowledge and to stay
current in their chosen fields.
GLOBAL LEARNING IS THE GOAL
MIT has established formal partnerships
with organizations that are translating MIT OCW course materials
into Spanish, Portuguese, simplified Chinese and traditional
Chinese. MIT OCW materials have also been translated into
Thai, French, German, Vietnamese and Ukrainian.
Other U.S. educational institutions and
organizations currently participating in the OCW consortium
include the Defense Acquisition University, Harvard Law
School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society,
Michigan State University, the University of California
at Irvine, the University of Michigan School of Information,
Utah State University, Utah Valley State College, and Wheelock
College in Boston.
The University of the Western Cape in South
Africa became the first African university to join the OCW
movement when it announced in February it had made a policy
decision to make its course material freely available over
the Internet.
OpenCourseWare is not about gaining college
credit for coursework, although in the future it might become
easier to gain such credit. Instead, MIT says on its Web
site, “This initiative continues the tradition at
MIT, and in American higher education, of open dissemination
of educational materials, philosophy, and modes of thought.”
For more
information on the OCW movement and for links to participating
universities and affiliate institutions, see the OCW Web
site.
For more information on U.S. policy, see
Education.
Jeffrey Thomas
USINFO Staff Writer
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