Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Things about opencourseware......

It actually starts with University of Tübingen in Germany.

It only became popular with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at MIT in October 2002...

It was made able thanks to advance of internet technology, such as server, bandwidth etc.

Till now, not so many University offer its courseware content free online....

Most of the university that offer OCW(open courseware) was based in America....

Even so, content shared is still limited.... ( i.e. video lecture limited to certain course and certain lecture only )

For some course( like humanities or socialogy) , open discussion in class still the best way to learn.

Non of Uk top university offer open courseware to the public....

4 comments:

Roy H.S. Lee said...

Not really.
Some UK universities actually provide Open Education resources in another way.

Please download iTunes and try out iTunes U, and you may find content/material provided by Oxford and Cambridge. :)

Chin said...

Thx for pointing.
But first, the content is in audio podcast form, where there is a difference between Audio podcast and Video Podcast, and written text for teaching materials.

which , judging for contents wise, is not the open courseware....

Roy H.S. Lee said...

"OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet."

The simplest OCW content for a course could be its syllabus solely.

Some of the MIT OCW courses still provide syllabus only. :)

Chin said...

if by syllabus solely then most of the university in the world already doing the same thing . ( open courseware) .

Which i believe we should have a consensus on this is not the case :)

OxBridge , and other similar univeristy do have a start-up, through third party hosting like iTunes U.

But if you compare it with what M.I.T and Yale and others currently offer, full video lecture + full text notes on a independant hosting site, you knew there is a difference.

Which, i believe, is due to the financial resources the university have, and hence their priority in allocating the resource