My experience in OCW

A few years ago I found the OpenCourseware initiative launched around 2000 by MIT. The idea is at the same time simple and a bit difficult to convey. Shortly after its successfull take-off in MIT, numerous universities around the world joined the initiative and today there is a massive amount of educational material available in numerous servers hosted at different unversities.

My university (Carlos III University of Madrid) joined this program a few years ago and regularly opens a call for participation. In 2007 I submitted one of my courses on Computer Architecture, a first year telecommunication engineering course. I never thought carefully about the reasons that took me to participate, but after a couple of years, I find myself preparing a presentation to give to my colleagues explaining why I decided to join the program.

OCW Presentation in UC3M

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By preparing the material for this talk I realized that OCW has multiple reasons that are not apparent when you read the information you find in the different sites. They are hidden behind the huge headline saying "Open Content". They could be sumarized as:

• It promotes the use of ICT. Both on the side of the teaching staff and on the side of the student. The more material openly available, the more interaction with it, the less traumatic will be the use of these resources.
• An implicit communication channel is opened. Your course has your name. People may contact you asking questions. I'm not referring to students clarifying an exercise, but other teachers that saw your material.
• Derived from the previous one, there is an implicit forum for degree adjustments. The task of putting together a degree is typically dealt with a commission. By publishing courses in the open, anybody could point to improvements or adjustments in various courses toward a better overall degree.
• Promotes the continuous evolution of the material. This is the most important for me. Educational material improves over several editions. OCW does not force you to modify your courses, but derived from the material being in the open is the notion of incorporating improvements.

These aspects were surprisinly in synch with my approach to my courses, thus my disposition to share one of them in OCW. I'm currently involved in another one, and I count on it to be out in the open after the second edition is done.

PS: And here is the talk: