OER1152 Oral Presentation ppt

Thursday 12 May 10.25 Cockcroft Theatre

Transforming OpenCourseWare into Open Courseware

Brandon Muramatsu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Conference Theme: Academic practice and digital scholarship

Abstract: In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced OpenCourseWare, as free and open publication of the course materials for nearly all of MIT's courses. MIT OpenCourseWare has served as an important catalyst in the open educational resources (OER) movement, and has provided the model for over 150 universities and educational organizations to openly publish over 13,000 courses and associated course materials. The majority of these courses follow the original model of collecting course materials and then publishing them openly. Course materials are arranged as they would be in a typical course, according to a syllabus with readings and lectures, and in some cases having associated video lectures and interactive exercises. These courses are thus "snapshots" of a course at a particular point in time, with the materials used by the faculty in the course. This model of publishing courses has served to showcase the courses at OpenCourseWares around the world, and has been used by faculty to see what their peers are doing and to improve their own courses. It has been used by students to sample the courses at their universities, and by independent learners to "study" by reviewing OpenCourseWare course materials.
As we enter the second decade of these open course materials, interest is growing in alternate models that include much more of the support necessary for independent learners and that can be used directly as courses at colleges and universities. This "open courseware" builds upon the lessons learned in openly publishing course materials through OpenCourseWares, as well as the opportunities raised by the confluence of the growing interest in open educational resources (OERs) coupled with declining university budgets. Through Project Greenfield we aim to build upon selected course materials published by MIT OpenCourseWare and transform them into "full courses" including support for formative assessment, the addition of existing, illustrative and interactive OERs. After "remixing" these courses, Project Greenfield intends to make these "full courses" available for import directly into common learning management systems/virtual learning environments. This presentation will describe the progress to date in creating "open courseware" developed through Project Greenfield.

Keywords: opencourseware; project greenfield

References:

Project Greenfield. (2010). Project Greenfield Website. http://greenfield.mit.edu/.

Muramatsu, B., (2010). Project Greenfield: A New Way of Thinking about MIT OpenCourseWare. Presented at OpenEd 2010: Barcelona, Spain, November 2, 2010.