Features

All-UC video conference on MIT's Open CourseWare Initiative

Fred M. Beshears, Educational Technology Services

Many UC faculty and administrators have been curious about MIT's Open CourseWare Initiative (OCW) since it was announced in the press over a year ago. Critics immediately raised the questions and concerns discussed below, while others debated the pros and cons of creating something like MIT's OCW here at UC.

To shed some light on the topic, UC Berkeley's Educational Technology Services hosted an all-UC video conference last month, which attracted over seventy participants from all the UC campuses.

The event featured presentations by Anne Margulies, Executive Director of MIT's Open Courseware Initiative, and Cecilia d'Oliveira, OCW's Technology Director. Here's what they had to say, and an overview of the internal UC discussion that followed.

During the dot.com fervor of the late 1990s, it was commonly thought that many prominent schools would be able to cash in by selling e-learning courses or course content over the Internet.

But, when MIT appointed a group of faculty to explore the opportunities, their conclusions came as a quite a surprise. In particular, their report challenged the commonly held assumptions of the day by questioning whether:

1. selling course content over the Web could really generate substantial sums of money,
2. commercializing course content was really in keeping with the core values and mission of the University, and
3. distributing course content over the Web was really the equivalent of teaching a course on campus.

The faculty committee's findings prompted MIT's top administrators to fundamentally alter their thinking and to refocus their fundraising activities.

The latter eventually produced grants from the Mellon and Hewlett foundations totaling $11 million in start-up funds to create MIT's Open CourseWare Initiative, which plans to publish course materials for two thousand courses over the next four years.

According to their website (http://ocw.mit.edu/), OCW is

A large-scale, web-based publishing initiative with the goal of providing free, searchable, coherent access to MIT course materials for educators, students, and individual learners around the world. MIT OCW provides a new model for the dissemination of knowledge and collaboration among scholars around the world, and contributes to the "shared intellectual commons" in academia.

Their website also points out what OCW is, and what it is not.

OCW is not:

• An MIT education.
• Intended to represent or replace the actual interactive classroom environment.
• A distance education initiative.

OCW is:

• A large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course content.
• A new approach for the open sharing of knowledge.
• Open and available to the world.
• A permanent and sustainable MIT activity.

Also according to their website, OCW course websites can contain the following items:

• Syllabus
• Course calendar
• Lecture notes
• Assignments
• Exams
• Problem/solution sets
• Labs and projects
• Hypertextbooks
• Simulations
• Tools and tutorials
• Video lectures

And, according to Anne Margulies, all OCW course websites must contain "a syllabus, some lecture notes or the equivalent, and a calendar to give the structure of the course."

It's also important to understand that with the advent of OCW there are now two fundamentally different kinds of course websites at MIT:

1. MIT's internal course websites, which are created and managed by MIT faculty and TAs, and which are typically:
   
   
   1. supported by a Learning Management System such as MIT's Stellar system, which is similar to commercial LMS such as WebCT or Blackboard, or stored as simple web pages on a departmental web server,
   2. password protected, especially when they contain copyrighted material, and
   3. used by MIT students during the course of a semester.

2. MIT–OCW external course websites, which are managed by OCW staff, and which consist of materials that:
   
   
   1. have been developed for and used in courses taught in previous semesters at MIT,
   2. have been tagged with metadata,
   3. have gone through a copyright clearance process, and
   4. are freely available to the general public under the terms of a Creative Commons License agreement (see http://ocw.mit.edu/global/terms-of-use.html).

To address some of the concerns raised by MIT faculty, OCW staff are quick to point out that faculty participation in OCW is completely voluntary, and stress that they are designing their publishing activities to minimize the additional demand on faculty time.

Of course, they also emphasize the need for widespread faculty buy-in.

Faculty can benefit from the program whether they contribute to OCW or not. In particular, faculty may be able to save time when they prepare a course by being better able to locate and legally reuse course materials in the OCW repository.

Persuading administrators that MIT can afford the long-term cost of supporting online content for two thousand courses is another challenge. Since Mellon and Hewlett have only provided start-up funding, many have wondered if MIT plans to support the project once the external funding runs out.

According to press reports and the OCW website, MIT's administration has committed to long-term support for the OCW. But so far, OCW has not published their estimate of the long-term cost to support the project.

Here at UC, faculty and administrators have been curious about MIT's OCW since it was announced in the press. Some raise the questions and concerns mentioned above, while others debate the pros and cons of creating something like MIT's OCW here at UC by asking questions such as the following:

• What's really new about the OCW? Don't most schools have numerous course websites already?
• What's wrong with simply distributing course materials over the Web?
• How would an open courseware repository be different from simply setting up course websites?
• What would be the advantage of setting up a courseware repository here, and what would be the cost?
• If faculty are not obliged to contribute their materials, then why would they do so voluntarily?
• Would MIT be willing to provide guidance to other schools interested in developing their own version of OCW?

Many of the questions listed above were addressed during last month's video conference. For example, MIT explained that OCW is different from simply putting content up on the Web in three ways:

1. Breadth of materials. Virtually all course materials for 2000 courses will be put online.
2. Depth of materials. Each course site will have more than just a home page and syllabus. Most will have lecture notes, reading lists, etc., and some will have video lectures.
3. Open and unrestricted use. All of the course content will be made public, unlike many internal course websites, which are password protected.

The discussion that followed MIT's presentation inevitably produced additional questions, and many interesting thoughts on how an OCW might work at UC. For example:

• Since funds are always limited, especially now, even a large, multicampus organization such as UC may not have the where-with-all to create and maintain in-depth course materials (e.g., a full set of lecture notes, lecture videos) for all the courses we offer.

• On the other hand, a multicampus organization may be able to leverage its resources by dividing up the work of creating in-depth course materials among the different campuses.

• Also, since different groups benefit from open courseware in different ways, some may be adequately served with a simple set of materials, such as a syllabus, course calendar, and reading list.

The UC discussants went on to identify the groups historically served by UC, and the benefits they might derive from an OCW based at UC:

1. The faculty member teaching a course.
   
   
   • OCW reduces faculty burden for publishing course materials online.
     OCW consults on site design.
     OCW coordinates content collection, conversion, and input.
     OCW provides graphic assistance.
   
   
   • It enhances web presence and usability.
     OCW provides copyright and intellectual property clearance.
     OCW adds metadata tagging for improved searchability.
   
   
   • It creates digital and accessible archives of course materials from past semesters.

2. Faculty teaching related courses.
   
   
   • Facilitates the sharing of ideas and content among UC faculty.

3. K-12 schools and community colleges that send students to UC.
   
   
   • Teachers and administrators can get a better idea of what our courses are about if they can access the content.

4. Prospective students thinking of coming to UC.
   
   
   • Prospective students can get a better idea of what our courses are about if they can access the content.

5. Students at UC.
   
   
   • Students at UC can get a better idea of how different faculty members approach a course if they can access the content.

6. Students enrolled in course.
   
   
   • Students benefit from better content if faculty are better able to reuse the content developed by other faculty.

7. Life-long learners and the global community.
   
   
   • Alumni and off-campus students (e.g., extension students) can benefit if the UC shares its content.

Although the video conference participants didn't come to a conclusion on whether UC should establish its own OCW, they did agree that UC should look more closely at the costs and benefits of MIT's experiment.

To learn more about OCW, and to see additional discussion on the pros and cons of creating an OCW within the UC system, go to the UC Educational Technology Standards Special Interest Group website (http://ets.berkeley.edu/etstandards/). This site contains links to web pages on this and other events sponsored by the UC ET Standards SIG. Here you'll find the MIT–OCW event web page, where you'll find a webcast archive of the event, presentation sides, and additional information on the questions and ideas listed above.

Finally, you can find out more about the ET Standards SIG itself by going to:

http://ets.berkeley.edu/about/news/standards.html

[ iNews | Issue Contents | Search BC&C | BC&C Main Menu | IST | UC Berkeley ]

Berkeley Computing & Communications, Volume 13, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
Copyright 2003, The Regents of the University of California