Edu-leaders

At the start of this Millennium, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) USA, launched OpenCourseWare (OCW) over the Internet, it could not have visualised the impact this innovation would have on education. Today, just consider what MIT’s OCW can enable educators, students and self-learners across the world to do: a teacher sitting in a small town in Tamil Nadu who is dissatisfied with her textbook can examine the curriculum and notes of her peers in US and European universities, gain insights and supplement her teaching with additional slides and presentations.

Similarly, a student sitting in, say, Latvia who does not have the financial resources to enroll for a Masters in physics can easily study on his own, choosing lesson plans from hundreds of universities that have made their course freely and openly accessible on the Internet. While this student may not get an official degree for completing the course through the Open System, in the not-sodistant future, when a proposed credit banking system eventually takes shape, the hours of self-learning may hold valuable pay-offs.

Unlocking Knowledge
The applications of OCW are varied. Policy makers across the world are realising that Open Knowledge is perhaps the only route to expand the reach of education and make it inclusive, as well as help institutions raise their standards. And that’s why the reason for the excitement. A match struck in India could, after all, light up the flames of knowledge in distant Africa or in China, and vice-versa.

Unlike Distance Education, which also helps the geographically and time-challenged individuals to educate themselves, OCW is also helping students and educators in centres of excellence to push up their performance.

Stephen Carson, external relations director, MIT OCW and president, OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC), a global grouping of higher education institutions, points how the initiative is finding applications in centres of excellence like MIT itself. In the process, it is transforming the very model of education delivery, changing pedagogical approaches, making learning very transparent and speedy. For instance, today 84 percent of MIT’s faculty uses colleagues’ materials on the site, while 70 percent of students use the site to complement course materials and improve learning.

As Mary Lou Forward, executive director, OCWC, says: “There is a global connectivity to the movement, where you (each nation) do not have to create things differently.” Already, OpenCourseWare projects have been developed in more than 30 countries and the sharing across geographies is instantaneous.

Here are some numbers from MIT’s OCW that describe the scale: An estimated 60 million people from 220 countries and territories worldwide have used OCW for a broad spectrum of teaching and learning purposes. Nearly 790 OCW courses of a total of 1940 courses have been translated into languages including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Thai at an estimated investment of $10 million; more than 100 complete copies of the site have been distributed to universities in bandwidth-constrained regions.

Records show that over 100,000 Indian students are accessing MIT’s OCW, and benefiting from it. And MIT is just one among the many players in the Open Knowledge Movement, and as it says, “Quite happy to be losing market-share”. Today, as part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, nearly 200 universities together have created materials for 10,000 courses. Outside the Consortium too, many players are making available their resources openly.

Of course, there are questions about sustainability. After all, how long can anything thrive on “intellectual philanthropy” as MIT’s efforts have been dubbed? There are other challenges and limitations, as well— technological glitches to be ironed out, policy hurdles to be crossed. But more on those later. Let’s first track how the Open journey began, its evolution and growth.

A Radical Idea
Professor M. S. Vijay Kumar, senior associate dean and director at MIT’s Office of Educational Innovation and Technology describes how in the fall of 1999, MIT’s President and Provost, Charles Vest charged the MIT Council on Educational Technology with determining two things: How is the Internet going to impact education, and what should MIT do about it?

At that time, many colleges in the US had launched e-learning initiatives with a view to using the Internet to cash in on their intellectual property. But, after a year of research, the MIT Council saw no economic reason for offering educational materials on the Web. Instead, they suggested opting for a higher goal—sharing their educational resources with the rest of the world over the Internet. This went hand in hand with MIT’s faculty’s passion for teaching.

Once MIT had put 500 courses on the Net, it began to get enquiries from other institutes interested in creating their own OpenCourseWare — and not just colleges in the US, but in Japan, China and Europe. The UK Open University, the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) of Carnegie Mellon were some of the other significant open initiatives.

Soon an exciting stage came when collaborations were formed. In 2002, the rapidly growing phenomenon of sharing educational resources freely on the Web was given a new term “Open Educational Resources” (OER) at a UNESCO conference. OERs, as Vijay Kumar defines, are more than the content of a course; they include a variety of resources that support learning— interactive content, simulations, and hands-on activities.

Fortuitously, around the same time the Open Source Software movement led to many software becoming freely available. Other parallel events that helped were the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, and the rise of free publishing movements like Open Access leading to creation of digital repositories.

Evolution and Growth
Soon, a consortium of universities all eager to share in the creation process took shape. Over 200 universities are today members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, and together they have produced and published over 10,000 courses. “Almost 70 percent of these universities are outside the US,” points out Lou.

The Consortium has ensured that time was not wasted in replicating efforts and also saved on costs. After all the whole bid to democratise education access is today almost wholly dependent on generous donations (to kickstart the initiative Hewlett Foundation invested $14 million, Mellon Foundation $11 million, MIT itself put in $7 million and Ab Intitio Corporation $6 million).

MIT’s operating budget for keeping OCW vibrant and relevant is $3.7 million a year. The Consortium approach has also resulted in unique learnings, such as how different cultures have different ways of approaching the open education concept. Take China, where MIT’s courseware was furiously translated into. From China also came another learning — on creating incentives for educators to contribute to the OpenCourseWare and improve their course materials (the selected course teams get up to $13,000 to make their course available online for free for five years). Mary Lou explains: “It’s an honour for them to submit their courses to the OpenCourseWare sites. They can also get nominated by colleagues and students for the prize level.”

India may be a late starter compared to China, but ideas for creating incentives to spur the OER movement are coming thick and fast. Ashok Kolaskar, convenor of the working group on Open Access and OpenCourseWare, and an advisor to the National Knowledge Commission, for instance, talks of creating a reward system for teachers who create assessment papers based on material from OERs to drive student traffic to these resources.

Driving Use
When MIT first began putting courses online, it thought that the biggest community of users would be teachers, as educators would stand to benefit from the sharing. But contrary to its perception, it is students and self-learners who make up the bulk of the traffic to the site — and surprisingly, visitors included even MIT’s own students who had access to the best physical infrastructure in the world. As Kumar explains, many of the constraints of the formal educational system are taken away in the Open System, as they offer alternate pathways to learning.

According to him, it leads to more efficiencies in the classroom. Points out Kumar, “in the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, it was found that the open design and access to a 14-week Statistics Course resulted in the learning outcomes becoming realised in half the time.” Open online resources also suggest that as a teacher, you can start thinking about putting the face-to-face time in a class to more interesting use, perhaps to answer questions.

For Kumar, the possibility of a five year degree programme getting reduced to three years courtesy OCW is feasible…but as he says, the converse can also happen …it could also be extended to a 100 years, as OCW promotes lifelong learning! In sum, virtual “meta” universities have been created, which offer access to cross-linked educational resources, promote efficiencies and varied learning outcomes.

Challenges and Solutions
However, the acceptability of Open Education among teachers and students remains a big challenge. Teachers think it is intrusive and impinges on their time. And students worry about job prospects. Can a student from the Open System, with no exams and certifications, expect an interview call from potential employers?

Rosita Rabindra, head of human resources at NIIT Technologies, says that “At the entry level, we have so far never considered someone coming out of the Open System.” However, at the mid and higher level, she says that the company does give credit to employees, who have undergone self-learning from an Open System, even if there are no official certifications. “We give weightage to skills, not to degrees,” she says.