Ever since I began the research on my MA thesis on the Chinese Top Level Courses Project, I was aware that I wanted to get the thesis translated into Chinese. Not only because I believe it’s the only ethical thing to do – when so many people in China have gone out of their way [...]

So far, P2PU has offered courses in English and Portuguese, and we have a growing Spanish community that is hoping to launch several Spanish courses in January. However, from the very beginning, the project has been incredibly international, with volunteers and course participants from all over the world. We’ve also been lucky to get publicity [...]

In this thesis, I set out to understand how the Top Level Courses Project was organized, and how it came to be. I wanted to compare it with MIT OpenCourseWare, and understand whether MIT’s project had influenced the development of the Top Level Courses Project in any way. I also discussed whether the spread of [...]

In the previous section, I discussed different European models of the university, showing the role of teaching and research in the German university, which would become the inspiration for the North American research university, and the French university, which would inspire the Soviet Union, and in time China. I also showed how the role of [...]

I have always been interested in Open Educational Resources from around the world, and in my presentations, I do my best to highlight not just MIT and Stanford, but also the amazing contributions from Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, the Virtual University of Pakistan, the open textbooks from Indonesia, the Chinese Top Level [...]

I have described the historical and contextual background for the Top Level Courses Project, and compared it with the MIT OpenCourseWare project using a typology based on four different purposes. I have also discussed the possible impact of the MIT OpenCourseWare project conceptualized as either a norm or a policy innovation. However, what about reversing [...]

We saw in the cases of other East Asian countries how personal relationships often played a key role in introducing the idea of OpenCourseWare to new societies, and this is true even in China as far as the limited role of China Open Resources for Education goes. This is quite consistent with much of the [...]

When I attended the OpenCourseWare Consortium meeting in Dalian, China in 2007, and first heard about the Chinese Top Level Courses Project, I thought it was created by an organization called CORE. So did virtually everyone in the international community. It took me a lot of reading and conversations to understand that it had nothing [...]

In this post, I will introduce the development of OpenCourseWare projects in three Asian countries that are close to China both geographically and culturally. I will later use these examples to show why it was easy for foreigners to misunderstand the developments within China. Japan Already in 2002, researchers from the National Institute of Multimedia [...]

In this thesis, I have tried to show that the Top Level Courses Project is a unique Chinese answer to national challenges, and not an imported model. When the centralized curriculum, which was introduced through borrowing from the Soviet Union in the 1950’s, was gradually loosened up in the 1980’s, it was replaced with a [...]