OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
asked themselves the following question: “How is the Internet going to be used in education and what is our university going to do about it?”
The answer from the MIT faculty was this: “Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.”
Atkins chaired an in-depth review of the OCW project in the fall of 2005 and Brown serves on the OCW advisory committee. The OCW project at MIT has created a very successful, compelling, living existence proof of the power of high-quality open educational resources. It is a pioneering project that has now become a catalyst for a nascent open courseware movement in service of both teachers and learners. Borrowing from the review by Atkins, et. al., we summarize impact as follows:
- Creation and continuing execution of a well-tuned process to obtain and convert most of the MIT course material to consistent .pdf formats, and to make this material freely available, to the extent possible without copyright violation, to the world.
- Commitment by a growing number of U.S. higher education institutions (community colleges through research universities) to an OCW Consortium offering open access to at least some of their courseware. There is a growing sense that there is room in the world for more than MIT courses and a growing diversity in both the topic and level of available open courseware.
- Commitments by non-U. S. higher education institutions to build new curriculum or transform current curriculum using open courseware resources.
- Investment by non-U. S. institutions to translate courseware from the United States into local languages and to make the translations also openly available.
- Early commitments by non-U. S. institutions to add to the store of open courseware in their local language.
- Encouraging signs of positive impact of OCW on education in developing countries.
- Growing evidence of positive impact on the students and faculty at the OCW supplying institution.
- Development of tools intended to facilitate the production (including IP scrubbing) of open courseware, e. g. eduCommons, as well community authoring and reuse of open educational objects, e. g. Connexions.
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