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 [...]

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 [...]

This is far from the first study to compare the Chinese Top Level Courses Project with MIT OpenCourseWare, there have already been a number of Chinese papers; There have been a number of studies published in Chinese that compare MIT OpenCourseWare with the Top Level Courses Project. Wang Hongju (2009) sees the purpose of MIT [...]

Nobody knows what the future holds for the Top Level Courses Project, which is scheduled to expire in 2010. It is probable that it will be renewed, but this could be done either with large-scale changes in organization, or relatively minor tweaks to assessment systems (Young 2010). Professor B3 believes that there will be more [...]

Although most of the articles are written in a laudatory tradition that does not doubt the good intentions or the success of the program, there are some interesting dissenting voices. Many pick up on the ambitious name “Top Level Courses”. Lu (2008) states that from his experience, many top professors are not willing to share [...]

Over the years since the Top Level Courses Project was launched in 2003, an ecosystem of services and providers has grown up around it. The Ministry of Education organizes a number of conferences and training sessions, as do provincial boards of education. As described in the case studies, universities themselves will organize internal training, both [...]

Initially there were no easy ways of finding out about the Chinese open courses, except for going to each individual university’s open course directory. There were some indices, but they were not very helpful. When the Top Level Courses Project was launched, there was no easy portal for discovering all the available courses. Each university [...]

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 [...]