Tag: open content

MIT OpenCourseWare: A Decade of Global Benefit

Among the many milestones we will celebrate during the Institute’s 150th anniversary next year, I am particularly proud of the tenth anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare, the start of which was announced on the front page of The New York Times on April 4, 2001. Since the announcement, MIT has published materials from more than 2,000 courses, presenting the undergraduate and graduate curricula from all 33 of MIT’s academic departments through the OCW Website (ocw.mit.edu). By the anniversary, these materials will have been visited more than 100 million times by an estimated 70 million individuals from nearly every country. More than 200 other universities around the world have joined MIT in publishing their course materials freely and openly, and have collectively published materials from more than 13,000 courses. This dynamic community, the OpenCourseWare Consortium, will gather on the MIT campus shortly after the anniversary to look back at the movement’s first 10 years and look forward to the next decade.

via web.mit.edu

Sal Khan

Khan has his skeptics in the education business. They don’t doubt he means well and is helping students, but they question the broad impact of any tutorial that doesn’t test performance or allow student-teacher discussion. “It’s a solid supplemental resource, particularly for motivated students,” says Jeffrey Leeds, president of Leeds Equity Partners, the largest U.S. private equity firm specializing in for-profit education. “But it’s not an academy — it’s more of a library.

via thelangreport.com

Sal Khan TED 2011

The way we teach our kids is…well, stupid. Our overcrowded classrooms with one-size-fits-all solutions teach good students that success and knowledge is the ability to complete tests with little or no relevance in the real world, and leave students who struggle in a spiral of failure that can dictate the limits of their future. It is a system that is good for no one—not teachers, not parents, not students, and definitely not an economy receiving more bored drones than engaged minds.

A few years ago, a New York City hedge fund analyst Salman Khan was tutoring his cousins. They lived halfway across the country however, and in order to make it easier to coordinate their schedules, he started making short video versions of his tutorials. And then a funny thing happened. His cousins reported that they liked learning from his videos better than from him.

At first Khan was surprised. Why wouldn’t they want the ability to actually interact with him? But then he thought about it from their standpoint and it began to make more sense. Having a video made it so they could repeat and replay anything that they didn’t understand as many times as necessary. They could refer back to weeks-old lessons without having to feel embarrassed about it. They could learn without another person standing over their shoulder asking, “do you understand yet?”

via good.is

OER, prevalent in discussions about radicalising Higher Education, now begin to make waves in schools.

Opening the doors to learning

Subtitling lectures from top universities in the United States and elsewhere means open courseware is available to all, Lulu Tsao reports

Yale professor Shelly Kagan doesn’t speak Chinese, but thanks to online subtitling groups, thousands of Chinese students can now listen to Kagan’s lectures. Over the past few months, China’s top-ranked volunteer translation group, YYeTs, has subtitled 10 of Yale University’s Open Courses for viewers to download for free, including Kagan’s philosophy class on death.

Open courseware, which includes video lectures, assignments, and other materials from university classes, is available to anyone with an Internet connection. While people no longer have to be on campus to watch the lectures, a language barrier remains for non-English speakers.

Volunteer translation, or “crowdsourcing”, is one solution that is increasingly popular in China, with Kagan’s course receiving over 10,000 visitors per day.

via chinadaily.com.cn