OpenCourseWare

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term OpenCourseWare , also OCW , freely describes teaching and learning units from universities that are available on the Internet as Open Access .

definition

The so-called Open Educational Resources are to be understood as an umbrella term . Free resources can be scripts, slides, articles, books, educational films, case studies, review assignments, software, guides, curricula, modules, or entire courses.

The OCW movement began in 1999 when the University of Tübingen published the first teaching videos for its lecturers as part of the timms initiative. However, it was not until the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which started the MIT OpenCourseWare project in October 2002, that it was able to achieve a significant spread . The movement was then reinforced by similar projects at Yale University , the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley .

Building on this, the independent, non-profit OpenCourseWare Consortium was founded in 2008 , in which over 250 universities and supporting organizations have come together to promote OpenCourseWare in order to increase free access to education. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance both formal and informal learning by sharing free, open, high quality teaching materials worldwide. To this day, the collective has published materials from over 13,000 teaching courses in 20 different languages, which can be accessed via the Consortium's website .

The OpenCourseWare Consortium defines OpenCourseWare sites as

  • free and open digital publication of high quality teaching materials, organized in the form of courses,
  • which are available for use and customization under a free license ,
  • and typically has no credentials or access to teachers.

If ten or more courses are published, a university will be accepted into the OpenCourseWare Consortium; there are now more than 250 universities.

statistics

The MIT OCW is visited by an average of more than a million students and teachers each month. Access to more detailed statistics can be found on the MIT website under the given reference. The OpenLearn is also a member of the OpenCourseWare consortium.

criticism

  • The course content is often not offered in full, so that the parts that are interesting for many are reserved for the paying students,
  • they are not always up to date.
  • One also speaks of a communicative one-way street, as there is no direct feedback channel to the lecturer or creator of the teaching units.

Individual evidence

  1. Tübingen Internet Multimedia Server ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / timms.uni-tuebingen.de
  2. ocw.mit.edu ( Memento from October 14, 2002 in the Internet Archive ) Announcement in October 2002
  3. ^ [1] OpenCourseWare Consortiums
  4. a b ocwconsortium.org Members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium
  5. [2] Statistics on the OpenCourseWare Consortium

Web links