Catching up with OpenCourseWare

The OpenCourseWare movement started in 1999 when the University of Tübingen, in Germany, published videos of lectures online and it only took off with the launch of the OpenCourseWare(OCW) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in October 2002. The movement has now spread to over 120 other universities worldwide. 

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Pioneered by MIT, Wikipedia defines OCW as course lessons created at universities and published gratis via the internet. MIT describes it as an initiative to put all of the educational material of an institute’s courses online which could be partly free or openly available to anyone, anywhere.

What sets OCW apart is the fact that it is free and is available to everyone and anyone via web access. For instance, in China, where Netease attracts about 1.2 million visitors per day, users view OCW as a way to learn English; to find out more about the experience of studying abroad as they establish their own study groups; among other things. The educational benefits of using OCW are evident, given that OCW can be easily adapted in most cases, or can be used in its original form.

Among the multiple advantages of an OCW, the basic ones include aiding college students explore a potential major as they plan out their programmes of study, enhancing their knowledge of any subject for real-world applications. It further helps them in gaining an additional perspective on a particular homework problem or concept. It is also understood that at conventional universities, OCW is often blended with other forms of learning for providing the students with quality educational experience. It also encourages faculty to update their courses as they keep a track of what fellow instructors are doing on a regular basis.

Having proved to be a life-modifying resource for those who have no other access to higher education, OCW’s beneficiaries also include self-learners, participating universities, and faculty members. However, OCW does not provide any credentials and self-learners use it exclusively for personal benefit and there is also an inability to interact with the professors who create the materials.

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Along with MIT, OCW is being offered by many other prestigious universities like Yale, Stanford, Tufts, Apeejay Stya University and many more. Apeejay Stya University (ASU) has also adopted Open Educational Resources/OCW with open arms. Recently, a workshop was organised by Commonwealth Educational Media centre for Asia (CEMCA), the Asian arm of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) to introduce the faculty members with this digitised academic hemisphere on the ASU campus by Dr. R. Sreedhar, Professor Emeritus, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, ASU and Dr. Savithri Singh, an expert on the subject and Principal, Acharya Narendra Dev College, Delhi University. 

Speaking on the occasion, Vice Chancellor of Apeejay Stya University, Prof. Dr. K.K. Dwivedi said, “The world has turned digital so why not education? Foreign Universities have updated their course materials on the net and this is the time that we need to innovate and design new pedagogy at the Apeejay Stya University.”

Dr. Sanjaya Mishra, Director, CEMCA who was himself involved in the drafting of the Paris Declaration on OER in June 2012, inaugurated the workshop. He requested ASU to develop their own Institutional page on the WikiEducator and in the days to come create an ASU wiki in their servers.

The participants to the workshop include from various sister institutions belonging to the Apeejay group. The training was given on Wiki educator and all the 20 odd faculty members created their own home page and got interested in this form of collaborative writing of course materials.

Dr. Sanjaya Mishra assured to support the Teacher Training Programme on OER so that the schools from the group could benefit from this movement.

OCW is a new and evolving concept. However, the recently added Google search facility on the OCW Consortiums website is an encouraging example of a super-organisational approach. The initiative enables searches across all OCW offerings. OCW Consortium has 300 university and organisational members worldwide.

Universities have always been keen to have their own area where they could be among their peer institutions, aiding students in the discovery of their content. Today, there is availability of a wealth of no-cost OCW material available to learners across the globe.