OpenCourseWare

The term Open Courseware, also called OCW, free open access on the Internet available teaching and learning units of universities.

Definition

As an umbrella term, the so-called Open Educational Resources are to be understood. Under free resources can be both scripts, films, articles, books, educational films, case studies, review tasks, software, manuals, curricula, modules or entire courses.

The OCW movement began in 1999 when the University of Tübingen published the first instructional videos of their faculty as part of the timms initiative. However, a clearer distribution push was not until the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which had started the project MIT OpenCourseWare in October 2002, the movement was .. then additionally reinforced by similar projects at Yale, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley.

Based on the independent, nonprofit OpenCourseWare Consortium was founded in 2008, in which more than 250 universities and supporting organizations have joined together to promote OpenCourseWare to increase the freedom of access to education. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to promote both formal and informal learning through global sharing of free, open, high-quality teaching materials. Thus materials from over 13,000 learning courses in 20 different languages ​​are published in the collective until today, which can be accessed through the website of the Consortium.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium defines OpenCourseWare sites as

• Free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses,
• Which are available for use and adaptation under a free license,
• And typically provides no certificate and no access to teachers.

From ten published rates at a university OpenCourseWare Consortium is taken, there are now over 250 universities.

Statistics

The MIT OCW is visited on average every month from more than a million students and teachers. Access to more detailed statistics can be found on the website of the MIT at the given reference. Also the Open Learn is a member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

Criticism

• The course contents are often not fully available, so interesting for many parts are the paying students reserved
• They are not always up to date.
• This is known as a communicative way street, as no direct feedback channel to the faculty or the creator of the teaching units.