OPENCOURSEWARE IS HERE. Gary W. Matkin, University of California, USA

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1 OPENCOURSEWARE IS HERE Gary W. Matkin, University of California, USA Summary The OpenCourseWare movement is here. For instance, more than 200 institutions have joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) and they now offer over 8,200 courses worldwide in many languages. The start to the movement provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and MIT has now spawned both an expansion of the MIT model and many variations of it. From the beginning, the goal of the OCW movement has been worldwide learning and sharing of content. It now faces new challenges; among them is the challenge of moving from open courses to learning pathways of larger scale, including open degrees. The premise of sharing knowledge from the developed world to developing countries remains an attractive prospect, one which engages the leaders of the movement. Yet, barriers are ever more clear. You will learn of the current state of the OCW movement, its challenges, and its potential. Learn also how to become involved in this movement. Introduction The OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement has achieved lift off. The movement began in 2000 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), supported by funding from organizations including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, decided to offer undergraduate- and graduate-level MIT courses and materials on a free and easily accessible Web site under Creative Commons licenses. This startling decision, coinciding with the e-learning gold rush money-making mentality that animated so many businesses and universities at the time, gained media attention and admiration from educators and selflearners around the world. As the MIT case study began to take shape first with 50 courses, then 100 courses, and, by 2007, 1,800 courses, other universities saw the benefits of joining this high-minded effort. The leaders of MIT s OCW invited other universities to meet and discover how to start their own OCW Web sites. These initial meetings eventually led to the formation of the OCW Consortium (OCWC), a non-profit entity with over 200 higher education institutions each of which has pledged to offer at least 10 open courses within two years of joining. As of March 2009, OCWC members have posted over 8,200 open courses. Evolving Models. As more universities have joined the movement and offered open courses, variations from the MIT model have begun to emerge. MIT s courses were almost exclusively created for MIT students, predominantly at the undergraduate level. The structure and completeness of the individual MIT courses show considerable variation some are rather brief expressions of syllabi and resources, while others are highly designed and richly resourced productions.

2 The original and still predominant MIT stance is the posting of OCW courses and materials without prospect of support or accompanying services. Other universities have departed from the MIT model in several ways. The most common variation is the translation model, whereby already posted material from one university is simply translated into another language (Mandarin, for example) and then posted by another university. The University of California, Irvine (UCI), the first West Coast university to join the OCWC, experimented with several departures from the MIT model. Its first OCW offerings were directed at working adults seeking continuing education, not degree-seekers. It offered visitors to its OCW courses the opportunity to learn more or enroll in instructor-led, for-credit courses, related to the OCW content. The UCI model, supported by funding from extramural sponsors, created OCW specifically designed for targeted audiences such as California public school teachers seeking help in passing state examinations for singlesubject science and mathematics credentials. Yet another model, presented by UC Berkeley, offers OCW in the form of the unedited videocapture of lectures, available for viewing on the Berkeley OCW Web site and YouTube. The increasing diversity of these models is another clear sign of the health and ubiquity of the OCW movement. Related Movements. Of course, the OCW movement is organically related to other open movements. As with any new development, the nomenclature and vocabulary describing the complex of activities are not yet clear, so here is a definition and description of the relationship of several emerging domains in the open space. Open Source. The word open in this context was first applied to software that became freely available often produced, developed, maintained, and improved by communities of users and developers. The OCW movement not only had its philosophical origins in the open source movement, but also depended upon open source products for its advancement. Open Knowledge. The broadest, most high-minded expression of openness might be called open knowledge. Its goal is that the entire sum of human knowledge should be available to everyone, any place, any time, for free. Knowledge, the ability to understand the world and to behave in an effective way, is gained through experience and the learning process. Open Content. This process starts with content and material such as books, articles, videos, and simulation. Therefore, open knowledge begins with open content. Amazing advances are being made in the availability and distribution of open content. For example, Google represents one large piece of the open environment, by providing millions of instantly available content instances, including content gained from digitizing huge libraries of printed material. Open Educational Resources (OER). But content alone is not often sufficient to achieve knowledge it has to be placed in a learning context. And that brings us to the open educational resources (OER) movement. OER are content that is specifically designed to be used in the learning process. For instance, a journal article is simply content, but that same article accompanied by a set of questions for the reader to answer is OER. A book is content, while a textbook is OER. By this definition, OCW is both OER and consists of OER. As such, OCW is one link up on the food chain toward knowledge. OER is the more granular expression, while OCW aims to organize information and provide it in discrete learning modules.

3 Open Degrees. The open degrees movement is the next logical step beyond OCW. It is possible that a specified collection of OCW could constitute a full degree curriculum, but the step between OCW and open degrees is a substantial one, involving the assessment of student learning and some form of institutional validation. A more immediate and realistic variant of the open degree movement, called OCW-in, will be discussed later in this paper. Open Textbooks. Spurred by the high cost of textbooks, the open textbook movement is advancing rapidly, progressing so far as to threaten the textbook publishing industry. OCW is related to open textbooks to the extent that the trend in the growth of OCW is based on content from open textbooks. Most importantly, open textbooks and OCW are merging. As open textbooks progress from the simple publishing of, say, an out-of-print textbook, to an example of OER with more features such as learner feedback and supplementary learning materials and resources, they begin to look increasingly like OCW. Emerging Trends. The OCW movement is both responding and contributing to some emerging trends. To follow are brief descriptions of the most notable and important among them. Republishing OCW. Once OCW has been offered online, it becomes available to be posted on other similar Web sites. A significant issue in these early stages of the OCW movement has to do with what is called discoverability the ability of potential users to discover the content and format of OCW. While an increasing portion of OCW is becoming discoverable through search engines such as Google, these universal searches are often obscured by intervening search engine attributes, such as non-open or proprietary material, making it difficult to isolate a subject within the OCW universe from the mass of material offered with restrictions or not related to the teaching/learning process. For OCW to gain greater exposure, it is useful for OCW producers to spread it around through the republishing process. UCI has posted its OCW to several sites including the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT), Rice University s Connexions repository, and on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) learning Web site. UCI has also posted several courses in Portuguese created by an OCWC institutional member from Brazil, Fundacão Getulio Vargas (FGV). Republication helps institutions identify and adopt material focused on their own constituencies, at little to no cost. OCW-in. OCW-in is an expression referring to the situation in which institutions consume OCW rather than produce it, by including OCW courses or materials into their existing courses. As more high-quality open material becomes available, the more compelling is its use in instructor-led classes. In higher education, course authoring is largely left up to faculty, most of whom have little training in instructional design. Now, as well-designed open material is available, the course authoring function can become more efficient. OCW-in, however, has not caught on in developed countries. Most universities and faculty in developed countries cling to the not-invented-here bias, because locating the desired highquality material remains an obstacle. Another challenge has often been referred to as the context problem. Because learning is so highly contextualized, inserting material created for another context into a particular course can be complicated. The educational background and purposes of MIT students in one course are quite different from, say, California community college students in a similar course. The wider use of OCW-in is dependent on several features not yet available. First, the discoverability feature needs to be enhanced. Second, user friendly course authoring tools need to be developed so that the downloading and incorporation of OCW into institutionallysupported course development processes can be implemented. In fact, some innovations

4 supporting OCW-in are currently under experimentation. For instance, Tecnológico de Monterrey, a private and highly respected Mexican university, has created the Knowledge Hub where OCW material can be deposited into a database. Tecnológico de Monterrey provides incentives to faculty members who search for, review, and download useful OER and OCW material into the database. Learning objects within this hub are tagged with subject matter descriptors and rated by faculty as to quality and usefulness. Credit for OCW. Credit for OCW learners is a trend related to OCW-in and to the open degree movement. This notion requires the intervention of some institution or organization to evaluate and record student learning. The most logical capacities for this type of intervention reside in the so-called degree completion institutions, such as Excelsior University (formerly Regents College of NY) and Thomas Edison State University. These institutions have had experience in evaluating credit and learning from diverse sources. They have also developed mechanisms for recording academic credit and granting degrees based on learning assessment. While very few OCW courses are created at a design level high enough to be considered self-paced courses, there is no barrier, other than some form of student authentication, which would prohibit the entire teaching/learning/assessment process to take place in an open manner. OCW and Informal Learning. Counter positioned to, but also curiously compatible with the trend of credit for OCW, is the formation of informal learning communities built around OCW. The rise of national and international online social networking has prompted the formation of communities around many interests, including common learning goals. This trend is clearly apparent to organizations such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, from which efforts are emerging to support learning communities. The not-for-profit world is also recognizing the importance of informal communities, which are emerging from students in formal education who keep in touch with their classmates after their course has ended to continue their association. It is likely that these learning communities may evolve into the OCW for credit realm as students seek recognition for their learning projects. The Special Case of Developing Countries. As MIT began posting its first open courses at the forefront of the OCW movement, there was the hope that the open knowledge and pedagogical wealth created in developed countries would somehow positively affect the educational systems of developing countries. With the posting of free courses online, great promise for such sharing seemed to grow. Indeed, developing countries were among the first translators of OCW material, and mirror OCW Web sites were developed in countries where access to the World Wide Web was either too slow or too costly. However, the barriers to sharing quickly became apparent. First, as included in the OCW-in description above, there was the context problem MIT courses, for instance, were developed in quite a different context than would be appropriate in, say, Vietnam. Second, even the simple translation from one language to another, let alone the issue of localizing the material, proved to be quite expensive. Third, a backlash called academic colonialism developed when western (or northern hemisphere) content and pedagogy seemed to be impinging on local cultural and national values. And, the flow of material seemed to be one way i.e. the giving countries seemed uninterested in receiving materials from the receiving countries. However daunting, these barriers appear to be falling under the promise that OCW holds for improving education around the world and the dedicated corps of professional educators who want to see that promise realized. Two patterns of national response to the opportunities offered through OCW are illustrated by the cases of Brazil and Vietnam. In Brazil, we see what might be called the institution-initiated model. FGV, perhaps the largest non-profit supplier of online education in Brazil, is now seeking government support

5 for an ambitious project to help the K-12 educational system. FGV joined the OCWC just last year after a mutual sharing of OCW with UCI. UCI s extensive OCW professional development content in science and mathematics for California teachers is a program being considered as a possible addition to the material already shared between the two institutions. Another candidate for sharing is the extensive inventory of high school courses available through the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), produced by the University of California (UC) and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). Obviously, government sponsorship and acceptance are crucial in this kind of sharing, particularly where national systems have clearly established curricular standards and requirements. Vietnam presents a more advanced undertaking which might be labeled the national infrastructure model. Launched in 2005 as a joint undertaking by the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF), VietNamNet-VASC (a forprofit supplier of Internet services), and MIT, the Vietnam Open Course Ware (VOCW) project now offers 217 courses, consisting of over 1,100 content modules delivered through an infrastructure comprised of three national technology centers and more than 14 universities. Despite this good start, there remain some significant hurdles to overcome, including resistance from some established institutions and, in some places, faculty unprepared to teach the content as it is presented. Each of these cases illustrates a more expansive view of the contribution OCW might make to the world. While we see that course content might benefit the end-user student, also apparent is the notion that the introduction of up-to-date, high quality content can be combined with both the upgrading of teacher knowledge in developing countries and the introduction of new pedagogical techniques. Conclusion. This brief description of the OCW movement, related movements, emerging trends, and their potential impact on education quality around the world is intended to help the reader understand that OCW is here to stay and will become an organic part of the international educational landscape. OCW will become an instrument for positive change well beyond the provision of free or low-cost educational material. Through the considered application of public policy and implementation by dedicated educators, these open movements will address the most pressing issues facing not only education, but many other areas in which education is such an integrated part of a solution. OCW is here. Gary W. Matkin, Ph.D., is dean of continuing education at the University of California, Irvine. Matkin also serves as the treasurer of the OCWC and as a principle investigator for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. For more information, visit or