Archive for the ‘OpenCourseWare’ Category

As we move into prime baseball-watching season, you may find yourself seeking a deeper understanding of the game. MIT OpenCourseWare can help. Just a sampling of what you can find:

• Explore linear impulse and momentum as applied to a baseball struck by a bat on page 3 of these Dynamics lecture notes [PDF] by Professor Jaume Peraire.
• Learn why steriods are considered cheating in student Brian Chase’s paper on the topic. [PDF]
• Understand what facets of the game are most likely to involve magic and ritual on page two of these Anthropology lecture notes [PDF] by Professor James Howe.
• Test your baseball physics IQ with this out-of-this-world baseball exam question [PDF] (question 4) by Professor Dr. George Stephans.

These and hundreds of other baseball-related course materials can be found by searching the site with the keyword “baseball.”

Livemint.com is suggesting OCW as a solution to the talent crunch in India. Freeman Murray writes:

I gave a talk on open-source education and pointed to a variety of examples such as MIT Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu and the Digital Studyhall Project http://dsh.cs.washington.edu, in which videos of expert teachers are freely distributed to the global community. I believe this model of open source education is the only scalable solution to the talent crunch facing the technology sector in India, as evidenced by the much talked about exodus of Riya.com from India because of the difficulty and expense of finding quality senior software developers.

Unlike China, India has yet to start sharing its own courseware widely, which is too bad, because the IITs would be a great addition to the worldwide body of opencourseware. Like China, India faces tremendous connectivity challenges as well, with no mirror site or other similar program so far that I am aware of.

WorldChanging.com has a nice summary of OCW in China. Chinese universities have some 1,100 total courses from more than 220 schools openly published on the web through the CORE China Quality OpenCourseWare page. I notice in the comments below that someone raises the issue of connectivity, which is certainly a challenge. It’s worth noting that CORE maintains a network of mirror sites throughout China to help address this issue.

Everyone knows that OpenCourseWare can be good for the mind, but MIT shows how it can be good for the body. MIT OCW’s Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation page shares courses on SCUBA, tennis, weight training, archery, fencing and sailing. For the more cerebral athlete, there is Physical Intelligence, and Physical Education for Mechanical Engineering–work out body and mind.

OCW in a nutshell, in a flickr photoset by Leigh Blackdall.

A group at Stanford believe so. There’s a petition circulating on Facebook and a prototype site up on the web. Standford would be a tremendous addition to the OpenCourseWare community, and it would be just as exciting to see a group of students leading the charge.

Here’s an article that suggests college students should think more about finances on the way into college instead of waiting until graduation. It also refers to one of the OpenCourseWare resources I’ve taken advantage of, UC Irvine’s Personal Financial Planning course, as well as a number of other useful resources.

Feeling unprepared for the new semester? Here’s 10 ways you can use OCW to stay ahead of in the game in the upcomming school year:

1 ) Beef up your study skills - OCW sites offer a number of study skills courses, including this one from the University of Southern Queensland.

2 ) Pick that major - Yes you probably could get all the way through school undeclared, but OCW can help take the guesswork out of deciding what you really want to study. Courseware available through the OCW Consortium site can give you insight into what is actually studied in advanced courses for a wide range of majors.

3 ) Brush up on last year - Use the Consortium site to locate classes similar to those you took last year and convince this year’s professors that you actually remembered some of it.

4 ) Sharpen your writing skills - MIT OCW’s Rhetoric class is a great way to remind yourself of the basics of good expository writing, a skill that never goes out of style.

5 ) Compare notes – Not quite getting the discussion of polymers in your class? Go to OU UK’s OpenLearn for another explanation of the topic that might be more your style.

6 ) Make up missed lectures - Sleep though that early morning Chemistry lecture? Video and audio lectures like those offered by UC Berkeley can fill in the gaps.

7 ) Get that extra practice – Big test in that Economics course coming up? Many OCW sites, such as this Applicaitons of Game Theory course from MIT, contain a library of exams from past years and often include solutions. Others contain extensive lists of problem sets.

8 ) Flash back - In that upper level course you suddenly realize you really do need to use that inverse trigonomic function you didn’t quite learn last year. Fortunately, lecture notes like those on University of Tokyo’s site can help you go back in time.

9 ) Flash forward - Not getting why you need to know economics to design aircraft? Check out lectures on cost analysis for Aerospace Engineering.

10 ) Study cool stuff - Getting bored with the topics you’ve signed up for? Study Kitchen Chemistry, Avalanche and Snow Dynamics, Tropical Ecology and Conservation, or anything else that catches you eye, no registration required.

This is three of a three part series sketching out some parameters for what OpenCourseWare is all about. It’s meant to orient new users of open content. Here are parts one and two.

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Given the variety of audience uses, a question that arises as schools consider OCW publication is inevitably “How much is enough?” Intellectual property concerns, faculty and institution preferences and publishing level of effort generaly dictate that only a subset of the materials used in a given class will be published via an OCW site. How much, then, is enough to provide significant value to end users?

This answer differs from project to project, often based on the audience that is of most interest to the publishing institution. For a school interested in supporting independent learning, a more complete set of materials is required. For a school interested in providing resources for educators and enrolled students, often less material from a course is still very useful, especially if this permits materials from more courses in total to be published, providing a broader view of curricular structures. The trade off here is almost always depth vs. breadth.

For MIT OpenCourseWare, the minimum standard for publication [ PDF ] has been that three types of materials must be included in a published course:

• Planning materials - typically a syllabus and calendar
• Subject matter materials - most often lecture notes and reading lists; these aren’t always enough to fully convey the subject matter, but provide enough information that at minimum users can access subject matter though an academic library
• Learning activities materials - At least one example of tests, homework assignments, projects or labs

With these three materials present, the hope is that there is at least some sort of replicable learning experience presented. Many courses go well beyond this minimum, including full video lectures, etc. Other programs include more content per course. UC Irvine, for instance, provides a full set of distance learning materials for each course.

This is two of a three part series sketching out some parameters for what OpenCourseWare is all about. It’s meant to orient new users of open content. Here are parts one and three.

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When MIT launched the OCW project, there was no clear idea who might benefit from the materials, but there was the shared intuition among the faculty who proposed the project that many would. Initially it was widely expected that OCW would largely be a resource for faculty at other institutions to use in developing their own courses. Students at other institutions might, it was thought, use the materials as well to help with the classes they were taking. Finally, there were probably going to be a few professionals who could make use of the materials, but the project wasn’t designed as distance learning, so this was expected to be a small part of the overall use.

MIT OpenCourseWare’s evaluations [ PDF 9 MB ] over the years have shown that in fact most of the site usage comes from independent learners (50%), followed by students (30%) and educators (15%). These numbers indicate that faculty do come to the site in disproportionate numbers (higher ed instructors are 0.4% of the US population and 10% of the US OCW audience), but the figures also demonstrate a significant and surprising level of independent learning supported by the site. Overall, OCW use has not been well studied, and there is much yet to learn about how the resource provides benefit, but at this point it’s a safe bet to say the materials are useful to a variety of audiences in a variety of ways.

This is one of a three part series sketching out some parameters for what OpenCourseWare is all about. It’s meant to orient new users of open content. Here are parts two and three.

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A look through the OpenCourseWare sites linked from the OpenCourseWare Consortium Use page will reveal many sites that look quite similar. The MIT OpenCourseWare site looks recognizably like the Waseda site, which looks reasonably like the Universidad de Navarra site, which is similar to the Novell site. Other sites are more of a departure. UC Irvine’s OCW, and the Open University UK’s site, for instance, depart in form and content from the others.

The OCW Consortium has collectively defined the term OpenCourseWare, and the definition is helpful in understanding the common thread between these different projects. At least in the Consortium’s view, OpenCourseWare is defined as the following:

An OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials organized as courses.

It’s probably helpful to unpack this definition a bit. The key components are:

• Free and open - this requires, at for purposes of the Consortium, that the materials be licensed for redistribution, reuse and modification. This is most frequently done via a Creative Commons License.
• High quality - one of the challenges of open education publication is quality assurance. Because OCW materials are published by universities and other organizations under their own name, they carry a level of built-in quality indication that helps reduce the need for complex rating and peer review systems.
• Course materials - typically (though not always) materials actually used for credit-bearing instruction at the publishing university.
• Organized as courses - reflecting the academic structure of the courses and often programs from which the materials are drawn. This is often spoken of as “content in context.”

These are the common elements shared by OCW projects. Projects such as OpenLearn build additional components on top of this common framework, including interactive support elements that allow for more feedback and interaction around the content.

I’ve just finished Charles Vest’s The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web. Vest was president of MIT when OpenCourseWare was proposed, and has been one of the strongest proponents of the project and the concept. The American Research University (published under full copyright by the U of C Press) is based on speeches given by Vest as the 2005 Clark Kerr Lecturer on the Role of Higher Education in Society.

Vest was president of MIT for thirteen years, an extraordinarily long tenure during which he witnessed extraordinary changes in how universities do business, and this book is filled with observations that can help emerging leaders of open education projects understand the pressures faced by senior leadership at universities. The book contains four chapters covering the relationship between universities and government, universities and philanthropies, universities and terrorism, and finally universities and openness. While the last is the most directly on the topic of openness (it recounts the development of MIT OCW), the others are probably as relevant, especially given that nearly all open education projects have sustainability issues, and because opening knowledge is both more challenging and important in a post 9/11 world. Very much worth the read.

I was looking up this podcast for other reasons, but it reminded me I should link to it here. Charles Vest was president of MIT when OCW was first proposed, and immediately recognized the potential of the idea. In this recording, he describes a vision for how the idea may develop further. Here’s the abstract:

Global connectivity via the Internet presents many challenges and opportunities for higher education. One major opportunity is the democratizing and empowering force of openly shared educational materials. Reflecting on MIT’s experience to date with its OpenCourseWare initiative and related activities, this presentation envisions the rise of a global meta university.

InfoWorld has a nice piece on Plone, which occupies an interesting place at the interface of open source software and open content.  As an open source content management system, it’s the tool of choice for open education folks committed to more than just the spirit of OSS.  Plone, of course, is the guts behind the increasingly popular eduCommons OpenCourseWare management system out of Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning.

Perhaps a little bit of self-promotion, as I’m the author, but a good source of data on the impact OCW is having worldwide is the 2005 MIT OCW Program Evaluation Report. The data is admittedly getting a little long in the tooth, but is a detailed accounting of the access, use and impact of the MIT OCW project.

The majority of OpenCourseWare projects out there are republishing materials created for classroom use. There are a few OCWs that are creating course materials specifically for open use online, and UC Irvine is a good example. They announced the launch today of courseware to support teacher certification in California. These sets of courseware are interesting from a number of angles–they have a different set of cost challanges, and they are generally directed at a particular audience, rather than being made openly available to an unspecified audience for unspecified uses. It will be interesting to follow how sustainable these efforts are as compared to resuse models, and how attractive they are to their intended audiences.

Here’s another memo from Pew’s Internet & American Life project, which is actually about China. The numberrs when it comes to China always stagger me. The report predicts strong growth in Internet usage in China, where currently only ten percent of the population is online. As detailed below, the demography is interesting:

In China, just over 10% of the population uses the internet, according to the latest government accounting. Users are relatively young, male, urban, and are disproportionately composed of students. Just over 70% of the user population is under age 30 and almost 60% are men. The penetration rate in urban areas is about 20%, compared with just over 3% in rural areas. Among occupations, students make up nearly a third of Chinese internet users, and business workers account for 30% more. The rest are a mixture of self-employed, non-profit workers, the unemployed, teachers, government workers, and army personnel. Peasants or farmers account for only about 0.4% of the online population.

China is already an important piece of the open educational resources movement, with projects like CORE sharing vast amounts of educational materials created natively in Chinese and translated to Chinese from other languages. The influx of new Chinese users will no doubt transform the Internet as a whole (as Pew predicts), but given the enormity of the educational challenges there, I expect the impact on open and distance education to be even more pronounced.

A timely article in govtech.com today about just the point I was making. India has gotten into the open education arena with a project announced by NPTEL that shares courses which are designed for independent online learning. NPTEL is the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, and here is their description of the project from their site:

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. This is being carried out by IITs (Seven), IISc Bangalore and other premier institutions as a collaborative project. At IIT Madras, the project is evolving and it is our intent to provide learning materials, digitally taped classroom lectures, supplementary materials and links to state-of-the art research materials in every subject possible. Currently samples from approximately 70 courses offered by faculty in various departments and to students at all levels (B.Tech, M.Tech, M.S., M.Sc., Ph.D.) are given here. Approximately 140 courses are in various stages of preparation and distribution through internet.

This is a great illustration of how institutions with different focuses create OERs of different flavors. Most OCWs create sites containing materials for classroom-based instruction, but there are several great examples now of institutions with expertise in distance learning that are producing materials that support independent online learning–including OU UK’s OpenLearn project, UC Irvine’s OCW, and now NPTEL’s site.

If you’re looking to get more involved with the OpenCourseWare community as a user, producer, or supporter of OCW, the new forum on the OCW Consortium portal is a great place to start. The forum provides spaces for community members to connect around issues of how to create and use OpenCourseWare content, and also hosts many of the discussions regarding the development and management of the Consortium itself. A browse through the ongoing discussions is a great way to get a better feel for whether the Consortium is a good fit for your institution.

With the launch of the University of Southern Queensland’s OCW, the OpenCourseWare movement has officially spread to a new continent. The site has gone live with ten courses ranging from Communication, Technology and Policy, to Creating Interactive Multimedia, to Studying to Succeed: Planning your study program day by day. USQ OCW is published on a Moodle platform, making it the second OCW implementation, along with OU UK’s OpenLearn site, that I am aware of that uses that open source tool.