OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
We recommend a visit to the Consortium website[1] for a glimpse into this exploding world. The Use section lets you browse individual OpenCourseWare sites or search across all courses. The Share section discusses global, institutional, and faculty benefits for participation in OCW. The Support section describes how a variety of stakeholder types can participate. There are also tabs to a list of consortium members as well as recent news stories about OCW activities from around the world, many from major publications. The Consortium site, including for example access to the OCW How To Web site,[2] seems particularly useful to others who wish to learn how to join the OCW movement.
The most recent meeting of the Consortium covered topics such as a collective research agenda, sustainability, intellectual property best practices, OCW and national education policy, leveraging other OER resources for OCW, as well as the OCW portal structure and use. The next face-to-face meeting is scheduled for Spain in spring 2007.
We believe that a broad, grassroots-driven consortium of institutions in a variety of OER roles is important for enhancing the reach of OER in the direction we propose in Section 4. Although the OCW Consortium may be emerging as this asset, it is missing the participation of many of the major institutions now being supported by Hewlett under the OER program. These include Carnegie Mellon, Foothill–De Anza Community College District, Rice University, Stanford University, the Internet Archives, UC Berkeley, and Yale. There are also other institutions in more specific roles that might be included. This raises the questions of what needs to be done to create a broader consortium attractive to a broader set of stakeholders and performers. How is the community being built by the OER investments going to be sustained and strengthened so it can seize an even larger opportunity for the collective good?
We caution, however, that more institutions and even more examples of any one course aren’t necessarily better. How would we handle a “success disaster” in which, for example, a teacher now has access to 100 elementary calculus courses? We need incentives and mechanisms to promote creation and access to fewer instances of the same course but with more support material, more commentary, more examples, etc.
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