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OpenCourseWare

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OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials in a virtual learning environment created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. Already in 1999 the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online in the context of its timms initiative.[1] The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at MIT in October 2002. Since then, a number of universities have created OCW projects, some of which have been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

According to the website of the OCW Consortium, an OCW project:

  • is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.
  • is available for use and adaptation under an open license, such as a Creative Commons license.
  • does not typically provide certification or access to instructors.[2]

Technology

A number of tools and projects exist for building, publishing, and viewing OCW. A partial list includes:

  • Academic Earth
  • Connexions
  • DiscoverEd [3] - an OCW/OER search aggregation prototype created by ccLearn (a part of Creative Commons). DiscoverEd attempts to address the critical problem of identifying quality OCW/OER.
  • eduCommons [4] - a Content Management System (CMS) for OCW developed at Utah State University's Center for Open Sustainable Learning. eduCommons is built on the open source CMS called Plone and is used by many members of the OCW Consortium [5].
  • OCW Finder [6]
  • OER Recommender [7]
  • OERca [8] - a content and decision management software tool developed at the University of Michigan's Open.Michigan initiative. OERca is built on PHP/MySQL and helps OCW/OER creators and publishers manage and process the intellectual property issues embedded within educational resources.
  • ScienceStage [9]
  • Videolectures.net [10]

See also

References

  1. ^ Tübinger Internet Multimedia Server
  2. ^ OCW Consortium Members
  3. ^ DiscoverEd (ccLearn)
  4. ^ eduCommons
  5. ^ OCW Consortium
  6. ^ OCW Finder
  7. ^ OER Recommender
  8. ^ OERca
  9. ^ ScienceStage.com
  10. ^ VideoLectures.net
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