LearnHub

The OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement has helped some of the world’s best universities offer teaching, learning and research resources by publishing their faculty’s course materials online and making them available free of charge. Despite the fact that most OCW projects are not technology projects, all of the OCW rely on web-based technologies to facilitate the open sharing of knowledge.

Educators are embracing new types of social media to take OCW to the next level and build a community around their virtual classroom.In addition, a large amount of OCW is being updated to include new multimedia capabilities and enhanced functionality. The purpose is to replicate class and lab experiences interactively online using visual technologies.

MIT’s recent evaluation report of its OCW collection revealed that educators were accessing OERs to support their course planning and preparation and to enhance their personal knowledge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006).

According to the MIT report, 96 percent of these educators indicated that MIT’s open courseware (OCW) collection has or will help to improve their courses. Students and self-learners, representing the largest number of OCW users, accessed the collection for various reasons, including planning future studies, complementing their existing courses, or improving their personal knowledge.

Utah State University is another one of several universities providing free and open content course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world through the OCW initiative as well as connecting educators, OCW content providers and learning communities with each other through the Center for Open Sustanable Learning (COSL) think tank and annual conference.

In April 2008, Yale University announced that it would join the OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement and offering free courses through Open Yale Courses that anyone in the world is free to participate.

Seven departments (astronomy, English, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology and religious studies) at Yale are among the first at the university to offer classes via the Open Yale Courses program.

The Open Yale Courses have been funded and supported through grants from the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation, as well as the Yale Center for Media and Instruction. Open Yale Courses have also integrated Creative Commons licensing into their course materials.

It’s About People, Not Technology

In the end, the solution to the issue of digital inclusion is one built around a symbiotic relationship between those who back the initiative, working together to empower educators to optimise global open education and, in the process, bridging the technological, community and content divide.