Open Courseware Consortium
= A consortium of 150 educational institutions putting their courses online for free.
URL = http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/index.html
Description
David Wiley:
"Shortly after the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare, MIT began an effort to recruit other "top" universities into the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). In the early days of the information age, when information literacy was low even in the developed world, name brands like MIT and Yale were the only proxies for quality many people had as they made decisions. (Keep in mind that movies, TV, and magazines were still telling people how to dress and how much they should weigh at this point.) Either way, not many years after the Consortium's launch, many of the top universities around the world had launched similar initiatives and joined the OCWC. Each and every one of them followed MIT's lead in adopting the Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, ShareAlike (By-NC-SA) license, although they were technically free to choose any open license.
During this period the number of courses shared by OCW projects outside MIT passed the number of courses shared by MIT OCW. This was a huge event for the field, and did surprisingly little to affect the amount of influence MIT enjoyed among the OCW schools. They had been first, after all, and would continue to be seen as the leaders of the OCW movement well beyond the scope of time covered by this chapter. While the reader may not count Utah State University with MIT, Yale, University of Tokyo, and other "name brand" universities, we had an OpenCourseWare during this period as well . It was during this period that I first felt that there was trouble on the horizon with regard to our licenses, and that we changed most of the courses in USU OCW from By-NC-SA to just By-SA.
The MIT OCW project and the OCW Consortium gave many schools, organizations, and individuals that could never have collaborated with MIT on any another project the opportunity to do so. Translation partners for MIT OCW continued to emerge from different regions of the world, voluntarily translating MIT's English language materials into other languages. And almost every new non-English OCW provided two sets of OpenCourseWares - their native language version and an English version - in order to "get a seat at the table" in the Consortium. Whether this was necessary or not, I know firsthand that the perception was there among the non-US schools. Even the French OCWs, who weren't participating in the Consortium as actively as many others during this period, provided English versions of some of their French materials." (http://www.opencontent.org/future/)
Status Update
- Phillip Schmidt shares his impression and the main accomplishments of the Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC) meeting in Dalian (China) held between April 23-27, 2008:
- "…while courseware publication was the starting point, and remains the unifying focus for the consortium, many of its members have moved far beyond just making content available. Some sites are offering support for self-learners, other projects are forming thematic communities, yet others are considering how open content creates new opportunities for informal (or non-institutional) learning communities. The ideas coming from this group of institutions are at least as innovative and radical as those in other open education communities…." (http://bokaap.net/bits-and-pieces/open-courseware-consortium-growing-up/)