The Impact of Open CourseWare

Open Course websites allow the general public to participate in an educational opportunity without enrolling, paying the university, and without the promise of earning college credits.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began the OCW project in 2000, with the mission of advancing knowledge and to educate students. By 2007, MIT had placed content from nearly all of the 1,800 on campus courses in the online OCW program.

To investigate this form of education, I elected to monitor and assess MIT's open course Introductory Biology class Spring 2006 . The course is very well organized, with a complete syllabus and assignments accessible online.

Design for Distance Learning

When designing a course for distance learning it is recommended to consider all aspects of the course as a system, including the learners, content, materials, environment, and the technology (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright & Zvacek, 2009). All components must be equally accessible to all learners, and must be functioning efficiently to produce a quality learning environment.

During the initial phase of developing OCW, institutions developed courses by “adopting an archival strategy: capture as much course content as possible in as native a format as possible, and place those artifacts online in an archival structure” (Jansson, 2011). According to Jansson, there are few statistics documenting the real impact OCW is having on improving global learning, and OCW “does not provide the features that are emerging as best practices in online curriculums” (Jansson, 2011).

In the text, Teaching and Learning at a Distance (Simonson, et. al, 2009), some of the positive indicators of quality in distance education include an explicit statement of the purpose of distance learning, and having regular faculty overseeing the curriculum and actively involved in the development of the course. The OCW Biology course at MIT appears to have this involvement. What the course does not appear to have, is the support from academic advisors and technical support. Students taking OCW classes do not have access to MIT staff or resources beyond what is available at the course site. The red flag, as described by Simonson (2009), indicating a failure to follow best practices for distance learning, is the attempt to directly convert the MIT classroom course into a distance learning course without modification.

It would appear that even after 10 years, MIT is striving to find a way to meet learners’ needs by providing access to their course material, yet there is still need for evaluation and establishment of acceptable practices to assure the learner is being served in the most efficient and effect manner possible.



Some additional links to information on the MIT site:
The History if OCW at MIT http://ocw.mit.edu/about/our-history/

OCW stories http://ocw.mit.edu/about/ocw-stories/

OCW Courses at MIT http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/

References

Jansson, E. (2011, July 7). Open questions on open courseware. In Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved July 27, 2011, from http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/07/07/essay_on_unanswered_questions_about_open_courseware

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.