OpenCourseWare Movement

Development of OpenCourseWare Movement

This movement emerged in 1999 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which attempted to position itself prominently within the e-learning milieu. MIT decided to open all its graduate and undergraduate course materials at no cost to anyone with Internet access. The MIT OCW initiative included materials that [Page 557]are generally organized in a one-semester course and used generally as supplementary material in traditional classrooms instead of materials prepared specifically for distance learners. By 2012, there were 2,150 courses published in the MIT OCW portal and 125 million visitors.

This movement was adopted in the United States and in many other countries including China, France, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. The MIT OCW has a number of mirror sites that include translation of course materials into different languages. The Spanish-language Universia, China Open Resources for Education (CORE) in China, or Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) Açik Ders in Turkey have translations of MIT courses in their respective languages. To promote the further spread and uptake of OCW throughout the world, the OpenCourseWare Consortium was established in 2008 with the participation of many higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world. An independent nonprofit organization, the consortium has been continuously expanded. Members of the consortium have increased to about 350 and include various higher education institutions, associated consortia, organizational members, and corporate members, according to the OCW Consortium website.

The target audience can be divided into self-learners, students, and educators. Course materials have been used for different purposes by visitors. Self-learners mainly use course materials to explore topics outside their professional fields, review basic concepts in their professional fields, prepare for future courses of study, and keep current with developments in their fields. Students mainly use these materials to enhance their personal knowledge, complement a current course, or plan a course of study. Educators use these resources to improve their personal knowledge, learn new teaching methods, incorporate OCW materials into a course, and find reference materials for their students, according to MIT’s 2011 OCW impact report.

The OCW movement can be seen as a subset of the larger initiative named open educational resources (OER). As indicated by Paul Albright, the OCW movement can be regarded as one of the most widely used models of OER. In this model, no interaction and no actual MIT degree is granted. It follows a very faculty-centric model in that faculty mainly provide the resources. The budget for the MIT OCW initiative has been sponsored by different external sources (e.g., the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation). Other OER initiatives, such as OpenLearn in the United Kingdom and OpenStax at Rice University, follow their own distinctive OER model. For instance, the general structure of the Connexions model is decentralized, which means it is mainly based on end-user participation. OpenLearn, conversely, has a blended model, which means its content depends heavily on the Open University’s course materials, but end users can contribute their own content in the LabSpace, as discussed by Engin Kursun and colleagues.

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