Our goal [at MIT] is to provide free access --in a well-organized, searchable manner-- to materials for the almost 2,000 subjects we teach....OCW [Open Courseware] exists through the generosity of the MIT faculty who choose to share their approach to pedagogy, organization of knowledge, and educational materials in this way. It is a voluntary activity for faculty, and their response has been so positive that we have had no doubt about accomplishing the OCW mission....We know a lot about its use because it is highly instrumented, especially by user surveys that receive remarkably high response rates. Students at peer universities are augmenting their learning by using OCW. A group of unemployed Silicon Valley programmers used OCW to master advanced languages while they were between jobs. A university in Ghana has used OCW to benchmark its computer science curriculum and revise its courses. An underground university uses OCW as a primary resource to educate its 1,000 or so students, who are members of a repressed minority in their country and are not permitted to attend college or university. A professor in Baghdad has based his research on data available in an OCW subject....
In addition, as we had hoped, MIT OCW is contributing to an emerging global open
courseware movement. We know of fifty OCW initiatives in the United States, China, Japan, France, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil. Thirty more initiatives are being planned in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Russia, and elsewhere. Consistent with our open philosophy, MIT OCW has actively worked to encourage and assist this movement....[Skipping a short discussion of DSpace and PLoS.]
My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university --a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure. If this view is correct, the meta-university will enable, not replace, residential campuses, especially in wealthier regions. It will bring cost-efficiencies to institutions through the shared development of educational materials. It will be adaptive, not prescriptive. It will serve teachers and learners in both structured and informal contexts. It will speed the propagation of high-quality education and scholarship. It will build bridges across cultures and political boundaries. It will be particularly important to the developing world. The emerging meta-university, built on the power and ubiquity of the Web and launched by the open courseware movement, will give teachers and learners everywhere the ability to access and share teaching materials, scholarly publications, scientific works in progress, teleoperation of experiments, and worldwide collaborations, thereby achieving economic efficiencies and raising the quality of education through a noble and global endeavor.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/06/2006 09:36:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
