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STATE AND INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE
MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) Initiative:
Reading the Implications
Russell Poulin, Associate Director, WCET, has alerted us to a paper funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and prepared by WCET, titled, MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) Initiative: Reading the Implications. It can be downloaded as a PDF file at: http://www.wiche.edu/wcet/resources/publications/ocw.pdf
A few paragraphs from that paper are copied below.
. . . Over the next few years, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will post on the Web the core documents for more than 2000 of its courses. Under the OpenCourseWare (OCW) program, these materials will be available free of charge to anyone with an Internet connection.
. . . OCW will not provide "online courses," as that term is usually understood. Rather, the typical offering will consist of key course documents: reading lists, lecture notes, assignments, and, where appropriate, experiments, demonstrations and samples of students’ work.
. . .The essentially costless, instant availability of these materials will open up MIT’s pedagogical methods to inspection by all. Faculty members, enrolled students and individual learners will be free to use or adapt OCW material as they see fit. MIT copyrights will require only proper attribution of authorship for any non-commercial use. (Commercial uses will require a specific license.)
. . . It is expected that other universities will produce their own variations of open course archives, and one of the goals of the MIT project is to help ensure that OCW is easily replicable. To that end, the multi-university Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) aims to develop structures that are compatible with diverse "learning management system" software.
OpenCourseWare is conceptually straightforward: put course material on the Web and give it away as a worldwide educational resource. The consequences for higher education institutions, both in the US and internationally, are anything but clear:
- Transparency of course materials and methods will allow easier comparison of educational approaches. Will such openness spur beneficial competition, both within and across institutions, to yield improved pedagogical effectiveness?
- With minimal control over copying and adapting material, OCW represents a new approach to exercising the protections of copyright. How will the resulting intellectual property issues be confronted and solved?
- Among the most important beneficiaries may be universities in the developing world. How can OCW materials be made maximally useful for countries with different languages, cultures, and economies?
MIT’s OpenCourseWare program is described primarily in terms of its goal to make available the basic content of nearly all courses. But MIT and other universities are also concerned with the development of underlying learning management systems (LMS) and related educational tools, to help institutions adapt materials from programs like OCW to their individual circumstances. To this end, MIT is one of several institutions collaborating on OKI: the Open Knowledge Initiative.7
OKI’s goal is develop public domain software for a robust "course management system" (a.k.a., learning management system), that would provide tools to supplement the many existing commercial CMS/LMS offerings now commonly found on US campuses.
Jay Thompson, Executive Director
Consortium for Open Learning
3841 North Freeway Blvd., Suite 200
Sacramento, California 95834-1948
(916) 565-0188 (916) 565-0189 (Fax)