Archive for the ‘OpenCourseWare’ Category

At the recent OCW Consortium meeting held in Santander, Spain, ten Spanish Universities announced the launch of their OpenCourseWare sites, which collectively contain materials from more than 120 courses. The courses are available though a portal hosted by Univerisa, which has previously translated about a hundred MIT OCW courses into Spanish and Portuguese.

Apple recently made public its iTunes U site, accessible through the iTunes Store. iTunes U provides easy access to audio and video content from 16 different universities, including Standford, Duke and MIT. iTunes U is an interesting example of non-profit/for-profit partnerships emerging in the open education space. Early on open education projects, and OpenCourseWares in particular, were largely supported by foundation grants. In recent years, however, open education projects have been attracting audiences large enough to catch the interest of for profit companies in an number of ways.

While the details of the collaborations are not public, the iTunes U initiative demonstrates how such collaborations can both build audience for the participating open educational projects, and help Apple generate unique value for iPod users. It further leaves the partners to concentrate on what they do best: For the schools, develop high-quality open resources; for Apple, make those resources completely seamless to use. I’m expecting to see more non-profit/for-profit partnerships emerging in the coming years, as open education projects strive to become sustainable and companies begin to find business models to build around open educational resources along the lines of Red Hat and IBM’s relationships to open source software.

The library section of OEDb has compiled a pretty nifty list of their 236 favorite open courseware collections. Not only are these collections very high quality educational resources, they’re also all free. The list is broken up into categories such as eBooks, courseware, podcasts, and videos. And since the list is so extensive, almost everyone is sure to find something of interest there.

eduCommons, the OpenCourseWare management system designed to support OCW projects like MIT OCW and USU OCW, has been upgraded to 2.3.0.

According to Open Up!:

Features of interest include integration of MOCSL tools (Annorate, Make a Path, Send 2 Wiki), support for MIT Content Package imports, improved RSS support for Departments and Courses, Course download for anonymous viewers, and mass copyright clearance and licensing change.

In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced their OpenCourseWare project, which would make all of their course materials available online for free. In 2003, MIT began the project. Now in 2007, almost all courseware is online, and the project should be completed before the end of the year.

MIT OCW content is currently receiving approximately 2 million visits per month. Fifteen percent of visitors are educators, 30% are students, and 50% are self-learners–generally professionals working in fields related to MIT’s programs.