Abstract
<p class="3">As freely adoptable digital resources, OpenCourseWare (OCW) have become a prominent form of Open Educational Resources (OER). More than 275 institutions in the worldwide OCW consortium have committed to creating free access open course materials. Despite the resources and efforts to create OCW worldwide, little understanding of its use exists. This paper reports OCW project development at National Taiwan University (NTU) and investigates its use with Google Analytics. Reports include strategic plans to overcome challenges to OCW creation and implementation, the project’s growth and maturation, overall use of OCW, and possible future directions. As a result of its 5-year development and of lessons learned, the NTU-OCW experience features: (1) integrating resources on campus and established operating procedures, (2) setting course selection criteria featuring the strength of NTU and Taiwan, (3) providing coherent program support to enhance faculty participation, and (4) adhering strictly to the Creative Commons license. Data from Google Analytics was reviewed for better understanding of the use, characteristics, course preferences, and behaviors of NTU-OCW users. Results show visitors were primarily lifelong learners (65%) in informal learning settings. Statistics indicate an overall successful use of NTU-OCW for Chinese speaking users, especially in urban areas where information and communication technology is more developed. Potential impacts and future improvements are discussed, including how to promote usage of OCW courses for on and off campus users, adding rating features and indexing for customizing search, and integrating OCW into the learning management system (LMS) as part of OER.</p>
Highlights
In the global movement of Open Education Resources (OER), OpenCourseWare (OCW) is an important force
Open Education Consortium (OEC) sustaining members include among many others the African Virtual University (AVU) for Pan African, Universia, Japan OCW consortium, Korean OCW consortium, and Taiwan Open Course Consortium in Asia
From the perspective of National Taiwan University (NTU)-OCW, several questions should be answered: Would the OCW concept fit NTU’s core values and characters? What could NTU best offer, considering its unique position in Taiwan and the world? To what extent has it used? By whom and how? How could the greatest benefit with limited resources be provided locally and globally? As a case study, this paper presents the situations NTU faced while adopting the OCW concept in creating open educational resources
Summary
In the global movement of Open Education Resources (OER), OpenCourseWare (OCW) is an important force. In November 2008, NTU joined the Taiwan Open Course Consortium (TOCC), and began research and discussions on developing a platform for open educational resources. In July 2011, NTU became a member of the OCW Consortium ( Open Education Consortium) and was committed to developing an OCW website with high quality course materials. The paper shares NTU’s experiences with implementation and promotion of online learning materials, OCW courses and discusses OCW use and provides suggestions for producing high quality online learning resources. This paper will introduce key concepts from the literature related to open education, OER, and OCW. It will detail the development and implementation of the NTU OCW experience. The implementation of findings and future direction will be discussed
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
