PART I: What is MIT¡¯s OpenCourseWare (OCW)?

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Slanren ×ß×Ô¼ºµÄ·£¬ÈñðÈË˵ȥ°É! <<<ÎåÀàÈË | Ê×Ò³ | :( :)>>> 2004-05-27 OpenCourseWare PART I: What is MIT¡¯s OpenCourseWare (OCW)? The vision A walk-through The milestones The stakeholders Technology Publishing process Language issues Financial issues PART II: Open courseware, a New Model of knowledge sharing Behind the scene Internationalization The reactions of other universities Reexamine the goals PART I: What is MIT¡¯s OpenCourseWare (OCW)? The vision Let¡¯s start with a message from the president of MIT: "With the publication of 500 courses, MIT is delivering on the promise of OpenCourseWare that we made in 2001. We are thrilled that educators, students, and self-learners from all parts of the globe tell us that MIT OCW is having an impact on education and learning. We hope that in sharing MIT¡¯s course materials and our experience thus far with MIT OCW, we will inspire other institutions to openly share their course materials, creating a worldwide web of knowledge that will benefit mankind."

Charles M. Vest, President, MIT Yes, it is all about sharing knowledge. It is first about changing mindsets and then, technology. OCW is an exciting initiative taken by MIT with two ambitious goals: The first is providing an online free access to all of the MIT's course materials, and the second is to give a feasible model for all the universities around the world to share their own course materials. The idea stemmed mainly from the open source software development under which the software is for free and the source code is subject to any contribution from the developers. The expectation of MIT is that OCW would have the same impact on openness of knowledge in the educational institutes around the world, as what OpenSource has done. Like any OpenSource project, where the selflessness of the developers is extremely important, the willingness of the faculty to share their pedagogic experiences is equally crucial to the successful fulfillment of the OCW initiative. The OCW was triggered by asking the question: "How is the Internet going to be used in education and what is your university going to do about it?" Form this perspective, the vision of MIT is further than the others in a sense that it extended their knowledge sharing beyond its own ivory tower, and anyone would be able to take advantage of it, free of charge. The promise sounds to be attractive, but many risks lie beneath it as well: l What comes if merely few people are willing to share their new knowledge, for example, because of revenue possibilities? l What if it turns out to be its own wishful initiative of which most of other universities will not accept, or implement it with their own visions £¿ l What if some financial crises come up? l And, language barriers? Maybe we need to take a closer look on it. A walk-through The milestones The project was first initiated in 2001 when the announcement was made by the President of MIT, Charles M. Vest. And afterwards, a pilot project was undertaken to put 50 courses online in September, 2002. At this stage, with totally 500 courses putted online successfully, OCW is on the right track to the steady state which means that nearly 2000 courses would be available online by the end of September, 2007. It has also gained a financial support of approximately 11 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation . Moreover, many cooperative projects has been undertaken such as CORE (China Open Resources for Education), Open Learning Support (a joint project by MIT OCW/ Utah State University), Universia (A consortium of more than 720 colleges and universities in Latin America, Spain and Portugal). The figure below shows timeline of the OCW initiative. Figure 1, Publication Timeline The stakeholders Apparently, OCW seems to be another e-learning initiative which offers many opportunities for students and self-learners to access the entire and high-prestige course materials of MIT. But, as Charles M. Vest said, ¡°The idea of MIT OCW is different. It is more related to business-to-business commerce. It is a form of sharing among institutions. It is a form of academic publishing more than of teaching. It puts materials in the hands of others to use as they see fit.¡± This indicates that it is supposed to be used more by educators and scholars than students. It is a window through which other teachers can look into the educational information of MIT. And an e-learner can not rely entirely on the course materials to learn any course as effectively as a student on campus due to the reason that it only provides limited materials such as lecture notes, exams, etc. For MIT Faculty, many teachers showed great enthusiasm on that and see it as a showcase for them to express their own understanding of teaching to the world, while others are not so interested in it due to their tight schedule or some personal concerns. (To have an overview of geographic data, please look at Appendix 1 .) Figure 2, a review from users¡¯ perspectives Stakeholder helpfulness Educators Self-learners MIT Students MIT faculty Technology Currently, the MIT¡¯s OCW was running on an implementation of Microsoft Content Management System 2002 due to two reasons: 1. Self-built site is not capable of satisfying the long-term needs of OCW with 2000 courses. 2. At the time of implementing OCW system, no open-source system available for such a complex project. Despite these facts, MIT has been committed to the building of open systems which is called Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) providing a framework for implementing learning management systems. And moreover, it also encourages other institutes to utilize open source CMS solutions ( Zope , Red Hat , Midgard , OpenACS , OpenCMS , and Bricolage ) , which would lead to fewer expenses. For more information about OKI, please visit: http://web.mit.edu/oki/ . Publishing process Figure 3, the production process From the figure shown above we can see that the lecturers are involved intensively in the publishing process during plan, build, publish, even support phrases in order to make a course published successfully, which gives extra time pressure to the lecturers who are already busy with their research activities and daily teaching. The process is perhaps applicable for many businesses where the jobs are done by some professionals, but it is obviously too time-consuming and complicate for the faculty, especially when continuous maintenance and update are needed. Language issues To make it visible for all people around the world, MIT established several consortiums such as China Open Resources for Education ( CORE ) in China and Universia with more than 720 colleges and universities in Latin America , Spain and Portugal . Beside these official efforts, the courses have been translated into many other languages , including German, Mongolian, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian, etc. And for instance, a community website ( http://www.mitocw.net ), which is created and maintained by some spontaneous people, is translating the site into simplified and traditional Chinese. BUT, there are some problems that need to be mentioned: 1. As MIT stated, it is not responsible for the quality of translated courses, therefore, the accuracy of these translated contents can not be guaranteed. 2. Because of lacking an efficient coordinating platform, the translating processes undertaken by the communities really take a long time, and more often than not, they lag far behind the renewal of the official site. Financial issues PART II: Open courseware, a New Model of knowledge sharing ? Behind the scene If we delve into the site, we can find that the structure is quite straightforward, which provides easy-to-browse web contents for the visitors. But the problem is that not all courses have same level of content. Some courses utilized all the functions and provide comprehensive materials including video lectures, while some others give only reading lists and related resources, even only with syllabus and course calendars. This uneven development of different courses sometimes makes the users frustrated and unable to have an overall evaluation of the OCW and thus can not fully utilize the site. And moreover, the OCW site is entirely course-oriented which offers no channel for scholar collaboration between lecturers. Now, we can summarize the pros and cons of OCW again with more details. Stakeholder Question Educators I can learn from the course materials that you offer, BUT , How can I contact the lecturers? Self-learners It is a good place where I can find many relevant materials, BUT, is it better than a book if I can¡¯t attend the classes? MIT Students I do not need a password anymore, I can see course materials of other departments, BUT, Does it matter so much for me? MIT faculty I did a lot for it, BUT , where is my ¡°reward¡±? Maybe I want more. Internationalization With respect to the progress of involving more institutes to the sharing of their knowledge, MIT hope that it can inspire and help other universities to implement the idea. China Open Resources for Education (CORE), which is supported by both MIT and 11 associate universities in China , has made some progresses. It does benefit many universities who do not even have ¡°close¡± publishing system. But it seems that many of these universities are focusing more on the sharing of MIT¡¯s OCW, rather than planning to set up their OCW agendas. MIT want to establish a standard for the sharing of knowledge between institutes, whereas it would become a nightmare when there is no shared need. It will also incur some suspicions from its competitors who may think that MIT is too ambitious and want to be a leader. And on the other hand, imagine that all the universities accept the idea and follow the MIT. Is that really good for the collaboration of professionals by taking form of only a course-oriented OCW? The reactions of other universities Reexamine the goals According to the MIT¡¯s OCW website, MIT OCW's goals are to: 1. Provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. 2. Create an efficient, standards-based model that other institutions may emulate to openly share and publish their own course materials. Compared with Charles M. Vest¡¯s words, ¡°The idea of MIT OCW is different. It is more related to business-to-business commerce. It is a form of sharing among institutions. It is a form of academic publishing more than of teaching. It puts materials in the hands of others to use as they see fit.¡± We can easily find that there are many misunderstandings of what OCW is even inside the MIT itself. First, it serves too broad users which results in the mis-position of itself. And second, it is very foggy to say that it is a form of sharing among institutions, eventually, it should be some sort of sharing among people. And for collaboration of people, OCW gives almost nothing. The last question is: where does the knowledge come from? (×¢£º´¿Êô¸öÈ˹۵㡣 ÏÂһƪæ¢ÃÃƪ£ºSocial Software and e-collaboration in education) slanren ·¢±íÓÚ 2004-05-27 00:57 ÒýÓÃTrackback(0) | ±à¼­ ÆÀÂÛ ·¢±íÆÀÂÛ ×îºó¸üР:( :) Êî¼Ù¿ªÊ¼ÁË Social Networks? Online RSS aggregator Leapfrogging OpenCourseWare ½yÒ»°¡½yÒ»£¡ À§ ¸ÐÏë Creative Commons License. Value chain management ¨C An ICT perspective This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License .