OpenCourseWare around the world: China and India
April 6, 2008, [MD]
The
idea of OpenCourseWare in
its current incarnation started with MIT (note
that the Wikipedia page I linked to talks as if MIT are the only ones in
the world who do OCW - I should update it, but I won’t manage tonight,
unless someone beats me to it). They received funding from the Hewlett
Foundation which has been funding
almost all the different OpenCourseWare projects lately (they just
announced another 10 million in
funding for various projects) and
partly because it was a decent idea, and partly because of the stature
of MIT, the idea spread widely.
There
is much to be said about the concept of OpenCourseWare in itself: the
fact that it is merely a static dump of course material, and not a
dynamic platform that people can collaboratively add to, and that all
the material was designed for being used in offline teaching, that MIT
spends several thousand dollars to get each course on the web (much of
it on faculty liaisoning and clearing copyrights), that many courses
have minimal materials available, that the format (PDFs, sometimes
handwritten notes scanned) are not conducive to reuse and remix, that
most of the readings on the reading list are closed-access and hard to
get for students outside of MIT… Indeed I often wonder why developing
countries who want to avail themselves of educational resources from the
West, such as CORE and
MyOOPS, focus their energies so much on MIT. I
think that for example Connexions, the Open
University in the UK, and CMU’s Open
Learning Initiative offer much higher quality
material for them, because it is either collaboratively edited
(Connexions) or designed especially for distance learning on the web by
pedagogical experts (the two others).
This
is all interesting, and I hope to research it more in the future.
However, there is some great material being published under the OCW
model, and the great part is that it can be very cheap - get a graduate
student to film classes, avoid using copyrighted illustrations in the
first place, etc. Most of the material has to be produced anyway in the
process of teaching. A large number of international institutions have
joined the fray (although Canada has been curiously absent, with its
first participant’s just putting out a few courses the last few days:
Capilano College). On the
OpenCourseWare Consortium pages there is an overview of many countries
contributing,with
lot’s of universities in Japan, some in France, Korea, China, Columbia
and Australia producing content, and existing courses being translated
to Chinese, Thai, Spanish and Portuguese. As a higher education geek,
and language lover, I find the opportunity to virtually “sit in” on
classes from around the world very exciting.
China,
which will be hosting the next OpenCourseWare
Conference
in Dalian in April (which I will be attending), is also producing a lot
of content. CORE lists 1117
courses
offered by various Chinese institutions, which is an incredible amount.
I would wish that they could weed through the collection though, there
is a certain amount of link rot, videos that will not load (or are in
very obscure formats), etc. However, there is also a good amount (from
random sampling) with very extensive collections of written materials,
tests, class notes etc. If you want more reliable videos, Archive.org
has a collection of over 300 courses with full video
lectures (typically
5-12 lectures per class). They all work, but most are Windows Media
Player or RealPlayer. my favorite is the course on Chinese culture in
France and Russia, with
titles such as #4 China Fever in France in the 18th
Century. I keep
imaging subtitling that to English or French, so that French people can
see what Chinese people are saying about how French people were
interested in China…
The
Indian Institutes of Technology, known globally for producing excellent
graduates, have also begun providing lectures online, through
YouTube.
An interesting example that you don’t need to invest heavily in
infrastructure or bandwidth yourself to provide these kind of services.
Their Youtube
channel
provides almost only science and technology courses, whereas my interest
is more on the humanities and social sciences, but for people interested
they should be great. What’s interesting is that we suddenly have people
sitting at home needing to repeat for a physics class or get up to speed
on thermodynamic, and they have the choice between viewing a lecture
given at MIT, or a lecture on the same topic from IIT. Both will require
the same (sit right where you are), and cost the same (free). Right now,
people might choose MIT automatically. But maybe there will pop up some
kind of social rating service, and maybe the thermodynamics course on
MIT will get higher marks because of a dynamic professor, but for Intro
to economics, students really prefer the IIT one, because the professor
is so good at explaining?
There is obviously a whole lot more to learning than just watching a lecture, but I think this ability to compare side by side could have wide-reaching implications. (Earlier, most people only ever attended one or two institutions of higher education, so it was hard to compare). I think it’s an exciting trend, and am looking forward to supplementing my lectures on the history of higher education from OISE, with a lecture on the same topic from a Chinese university.
Stian Thank you to joiseyshowaa, seccad, Stuck in Customs, Yuek Hahnand World Bank Photo Collection for the photos.
Stian Håklev April 6, 2008 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus