OpenCourseWare Consortium
From LIS 460 Summer 2007
Contents |
What is OpenCourseWare Consortium?
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a group of over 100 academic institutions and organizations from around the world, who provide free access to classes and course content on a variety of subjects. The mission of the Consortium is to “advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.” Users of opencourseware have access to the same content as those who have taken the class, making this a powerful learning tool for the world community. The main difference though, is that using content on OpenCourseWare does not provide course credit, signify enrollment at that school, nor does it provide you with access to the professors. OpenCourseWare is simply a school’s way of sharing knowledge with anyone from around the world.
Currently, content from universities and organizations comes from 19 countries around the world. To be part of this consortium, the academic institution must commit to adding at least ten courses to the OpenCourseWare site.
Some of the current academic participants are…
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of California, Irvine
Also, Creative Commons is one of several affiliated organizations.
As of November 2006, MIT had posted over 1550 courses on OpenCourseWare. Their goal is to post nearly all of their undergraduate and graduate courses by 2008. Each class typically includes a syllabus, course notes, homework assignments (with answers) as well as quizzes and tests.
How can OCW be used in a school library?
For students who are interested in topics that the school library lacks resources on, the OCW site would be a great place to find information. OCW posts course materials on a variety of subjects across the curriculum. While the content was developed for undergraduates and graduate students, this may help to fill a need for students who have interests in areas beyond their school’s course offerings.
Talking with teachers and students about opencourseware also presents opportunities to talk about copyright.
Questions?
Are the contents of the courses under copyright?
The idea of open courseware is that it is freely available to anyone in the world. The content is not licensed under traditional copyright. For example, the license for MIT’s courses is from Creative Commons and it falls under the license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5.
Resources and Links:
OpenCourseWare Consortium home page
Blog from Utah State OCW
News about OCW
