OpenCourseWare in China
OpenCourseWare, a project to put university courses online for free, originally initiated by MIT and the Hewlett Foundation, began movement in China in September, 2003, when MIT and the International Engineering Technology Foundation (IETF) joined together with the Beijing Jiaotong University to organize an OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing. As a result of this conference, 12 universities petitioned the government to institute a program of OpenCourseWare in China. This group included both some of the most prestigious universities in China, as well as the Central Radio and Television University, which is China’s central open university, covering more than 2 million students.
As a result of this petition, the Chinese government instituted the China Quality OpenCourseWare (精品课程) program, overseen by the Ministry of Education. This program accepts applications for university lectureres that wish to put their courses online, and gives grants of between $10-15,000 CAD per course that is put online, and made available free of charge to the general public (ibid.). The most prestigious award is for the “national level CQOCW”, then there is “provincial level” and “school level”. In 2008, 1799 courses at the national level, over 5000 courses at the provincial level, and over 10,000 courses at the university level had been made available online. These typically include syllabus, course notes, overheads, assignments, and in many cases audio or video of the entire lectures (Wang, 2008). The scale of this project has also spurred a large research activity, and over 3,000 journal articles have been written in Chinese about the topic of OpenCourseWare (CAJ, 2008).
At the same time, the China Open Resources for Education was set up as an NGO, with Fun-Den Wang (the head of IETF) as chairman, and the twelve universities as members. This organization organized volunteers to translate MIT OpenCourseWare into Chinese and to promote the idea of OpenCourseWare in China. At the end of 2007, 245 courses had been translated into Chinese, and these were used by 200 professors in courses involving a total of 8,000 students.
There have also been produced 148 comparative studies comparing MIT curriculum with Chinese curriculum using the MIT OpenCourseWare material (CORE, 2007). CORE's offices are hosted within the China Central Radio and Television University, and they receive partial funding from the IETF and from the Hewlett foundation (Wang, 2008). They also host annual conferences on open education, and the 2008 conference was co-located with the international OpenCourseWare Consortium conference, which brought a large amount of foreign participants (CORE, 2008).
References
- CAJ (2008). "Search for “精品课程” across all categories". China Academic Journals. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
- CORE (2007). 2007 "Annual Report". CORE. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
- CORE (2008). Open Education Conference 2008 held in April in Dalian, China. CORE. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.
- Wang, F. (2008). "Open Education Resources—Concept, Status and Frontier". 22nd Annual Conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities (AAOU). Tianjin, China. Retrieved on December 18, 2008.