Jeffrey Young, 'Open Courseware' Idea Spreads, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: 'When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced an ambitious plan to give away online materials for every course, officials wondered whether other colleges and universities would follow suit. The answer? Sort of. Nearly four years after the start of MIT's OpenCourseWare project, several colleges met to unveil their own plans to publish extensive sets of course materials -- such as syllabi, lecture notes, and quizzes -- and encourage anyone to use them freely. There is one major difference: No one other than MIT is pledging to give away every course. And most of the newcomers expect to convert only a handful of courses per year to an open format....The growth of these giveaways marks a major philosophical shift from the mid-1990s, when many colleges and professors thought they could rake in profits selling course materials online...."I'm not surprised right away that it's a little slow to take off," says Frank Mayadas, program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "Regardless of the motivation and desire, it just isn't going to take off like wildfire" because of the cost....Representatives from MIT and six other U.S. universities that are starting open-courseware projects met at MIT in February to trade tips on how to manage their projects. Representatives from Chinese universities attended as well, as did officials from Universia.net, a coalition of universities in Portugal, Spain, and several South American countries that is working to translate MIT's course materials into Spanish and Portuguese. The U.S. institutions represented were the Harvard University Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, Tufts University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's School of Information, the University of Notre Dame, and Utah State University.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/28/2005 10:26:00 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.
