OpenCourseWare in Japan
This article describes how OpenCourseWare, a project to put university courses online for free, originally initiated by MIT and the Hewlett Foundation, was introduced and adopted in Japan.
Already in 2002, researchers from the National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT) went to study the MIT OpenCourseWare, and this led to an OCW pilot plan with 50 courses at Tokyo Institute of Technology in September (Kobayashi & Kawafuchi, 2006a). Later, in 2004, people from MIT gave an invited lecture about MIT OpenCourseWare at TIT in July 2004, and after that, the first meeting of the Japan OCW Alliance was held with four Japanese universities. These had mainly been recruited through the efforts of MIT professor Miyagawa, and his personal contacts. In one case, the connection was the former president of Tokyo University being an acquintance of Charles Vest, the former president of MIT (Makoshi, 2006).
Subsequently, in 2006 the OCW International Conference was held at Kyoto University, and at that conference, the Japan OCW Association was reorganized into the Japan OCW Consortium (Kobayashi & Kawafuchi, 2006a). By that time, they had over 600 courses and currently they have 18 university members, including the United Nations University (JOCW, n.d.). On Japanese university campuses there are few experts in content production, which makes it difficult to get support locally, and many of the universities had to out-source their production of OCW - while Tokyo University mainly employs students (Kobayashi and Kawafuchi, 2006a).
The motivation for joining the OCW movement seems to be to create positive change among Japanese universities, including modernizing presentation style among lecturers, as well as sharing learning material (Makoshi, 2006). Japanese researchers have been particularly interested in the technical aspects of OCW, for example in creating semantic search engines. Kobayashi and Kawafuchi (2006b) states that there is currently a growing interest for OER among Japanese universities, and more universities are expected to join the consortium. They end with a strong statement on the necessity to indigenize OCW:
“In order to become an integral institution that contributes to OER, the JOCW Consortium needs to forge solidarity among the member universities and build a rational for OER on its own, different from that of MIT, which would support the international deployment of Japanese universities and also Japanese style e-Learning.” (p. 12)
References
- Kobayashi, T. & Kawafuchi, A. (2006a). "Japan Open Course Ware Consortium (JOCW): A Case Study in Open Educational Resources Production and Use in Higher Education". OECD/CERI Report. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
- Kobayashi, T. & Kawafuchi, A. (2006b). "Recent Moves in Promoting e-Learning in Japanese Higher Education with a Focus upon OER". Paper presented at European Association of Distance Teaching Universities, Tallinn, Estonia. Retrieved on December 18, 2008 from
- Makoshi, N. (2006). "TokyoTech OCW WG and Japan OCW Consortium". Paper given to joint OECD/AIDE conference. Retrieved on December 19, 2008.