This thesis does not intend to evaluate the success of the Top Level Courses Project, which would require a much more rigorous study design. There are some Chinese studies that have looked at evaluating the project, however they often don’t separate clearly between which of the four possible purposes of OER they are attempting to [...]

When discussing the effects of the Top Level Courses Project with academic affairs officers and members of the evaluation committee, many of their answers reflected the experiences of individual teachers. There was agreement that it had raised the quality of courses, and the awareness of pedagogy and standards. Mr. B0 said that all academic staff [...]

In my previous post, I introduced the course case studies. In this post, I will describe how the professors described the impact of having their course selected as a Top Level Course. When asked about what had changed after applying for the Top Level Courses designation, most of the answers from professors centered around the [...]

In my previous post, I introduced the course case studies. In this post, I will describe their experiences with applying for the Top Level Courses designation. Both Professor B1 and Professor A2 were relatively early in applying for the Top Level Course designation. In both cases, they realized that their existing material was a very [...]

I interviewed five professors at two universities who have had their courses selected as Top Level Courses. Below, I will briefly introduce the courses, and in later posts, I will detail these professors’ experiences with course selection, and the impact of having been selected. An interesting finding from the interviews was that most courses had [...]

This section will provide a view of the Top Level Courses Project from the institutional perspective. Based on interviews with professors, administrators, and some published literature and reports, I will first describe some cases for how universities organize the selection of courses. University-level Top Level Course selection is organized and implemented by individual universities, based [...]

Open Access Week is a great idea – now in its fourth year, it really enables communities to come together across the world to promote the concept of Open Access. Last year, we had a number of very successful events at University of Toronto, I gave a talk about institutional models for OER (video, Mp3, [...]

The Top Level Courses Project’s official title was “Project for the quality of teaching and reform of teaching in institutions of higher education, work on the construction of Top Level courses”, and was always meant to be a part of a larger project for enhancing quality and reforming teaching in higher education. In 2007, the [...]

As the Ministry of Education has gained experience, there have been continuous changes from year to year of the evaluation criteria for Top Level Courses. These range from minor variations in the rating rubrics used, to more large-scale changes in priorities. The actual rubric used to evaluate courses has five comprehensive indicators: teaching teams, teaching [...]

The initial policy defined a quality course as being a model course with “first-class teaching teams, first-class teaching content, first-class teaching methods, first-class course materials, first class teaching and first-class teaching management” (MoE 2003). These “six first-classes” are mentioned in almost all literature on the project, and were also repeated by most of my interview [...]