MIT OpenCourseWare Research Articles

Learning Object Repository Systems and Their Use in Greek Education

The article explores how modern information and communication technologies (ICT) enhance educational quality, emphasizing the importance of pedagogically sound applications to address the limitations of traditional educational systems. While ICT offers considerable benefits, such as increased engagement and support for collaborative learning, the integration of these technologies in education presents challenges, including disparities in access and shifts in learning methodologies. The concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) is highlighted as a transformative approach, allowing for the creation and sharing of diverse learning materials, which are crucial for promoting accessibility and equity in education. Additionally, the article discusses organizational development issues that schools face when implementing ICT, such as the need for adaptive school cultures, leadership support, and the alignment of school policies with ICT goals. It also presents examples of digital repositories and open educational resources, like Project Gutenberg, ERIC, and MIT OpenCourseWare, which provide free access to educational materials. In Greece, national projects have introduced digital literacy into the school community, with repositories such as Photodentro LOR and Helios, supporting the country's commitment to digital education aligned with the European Digital Agenda.

How to do things with modes. Transmodality in slides

Slideshows are ubiquitous in today’s academic events such as university lectures. Thus, it appears imperative to investigate the evolution of the modes which are implemented in processes of knowledge communication through slideshows. In particular, this study focuses on the complex relations between texts and images and on the multifaceted functions that different modes assume. A corpus of lecture slides drawn from the MIT OpenCourseWare site is investigated from a transmodal perspective by adopting a qualitative approach. The analysis shows that the production of slides is based on the exploitation of multiple modes which co-act for the fulfillment of different pragmatic needs (e.g. informative, persuasive, or interactional) and assume a mutually constructive function. This paper also argues for the significance of transmodal research in academic contexts, especially in the light of the constant technological and epistemological shift which accompanies the evolution of teaching practices in higher education. Indeed, a transmodal approach can facilitate a wider understanding of the affordances and limitations of the different semiotic resources, which need to be conceived from a complementary and syncretic perspective.

Exploring Fraunhofer diffraction through Tracker and spreadsheet: An alternative lab activity for distance learning

In this paper, we present an alternative for physics laboratory activity related to Fraunhofer diffraction in distance learning. The activity utilizes a demonstration video from MIT Open CourseWare, Tracker software, and spreadsheet. An online demonstration video is used because it is the most accessible resource during undesirable conditions such as COVID 19 pandemic. In the activity, students can explore diffractions phenomena with multiple slits. The effect of slit spacing and slit numbers to the intensity of light is investigated trough spectral analysis with Tracker. The investigation is followed by a discussion through the mathematical approach and visualization with spreadsheets. It will enrich students with a theoretical explanation of the observation. This distance learning activity allows students to develop their science process skills, mathematical and computational thinking skills, and conceptual understanding of Fraunhofer diffraction.

OASIS: Openly Available Sources Integrated Search

OASIS is a freely available librarian developed OER search tool. It currently searches almost 100 sources from reputable organizations such as Cornell Open, OpenStax, and MIT Open Courseware with new content being added regularly. Source types include textbooks, courses, course materials, simulations, books, audiobooks, videos, podcasts, learning objects, and primary sources. Users can search OASIS directly from the search box on the main page or use the advanced search option. Search functionality works well but there are no options to sort results by relevancy or date. However, users can filter results by type, subject, source, license and reviews. The pages are clear and easy to read and there were only minor issues with accessibility. Overall OASIS is a good search tool for finding quality OER materials.

Open Educational Resources and Practices in China: A Systematic Literature Review

The concepts of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP), regarded as two pillars of the broader open education movement, have been evolving since the concept of OER was first coined in the 2012 Paris Declaration. Several research studies have been conducted to investigate the impacts of OER and OEP adoption and implementation in universities. However, most of those studies have focused on western and developed countries, and little information is known about developing countries, especially Asian ones. Particularly, China was one of the first Asian countries to adopt open education and its related strategies following the MIT OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing in 2003. This study conducts a systematic literature review to investigate the current state of the art of OER and OEP in China. The findings show that several governmental, organizational, and institutional initiatives have been launched to facilitate OER adoption in China. They also show that while several OEPs have been implemented, there is still a continuous need to work on these practices and further investigate their impacts on learning outcomes and behaviors, as no current reviewed study has done so. Finally, a generic framework of OER and OEP challenges is presented along with recommendations to further enhance the adoption of OER and OEP in China.

Awareness and use of massive open online courses among academic librarians in Ogun state, Nigeria

The dynamism of the current digital era requires academic librarians to be lifelong learners who can take advantage of available opportunities to improve their professional competence continuously. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are online learning platforms that provide training to learners at little or no costs. While it is documented that a lot of Africans participate in MOOCs, it is not certain whether academic librarians in Nigeria are aware of and take full advantage of MOOCs. The study surveyed awareness and use of MOOCs among academic librarians in Nigeria. A questionnaire was used for data collection. This was administered to 83 librarians from five randomly selected university libraries in Ogun state, Nigeria. Data were subjected to descriptive analysis. The findings revealed that more than half (61.4%) of the respondents were aware of MOOCs whereas, only (42.9%) enrolled for MOOCs. MIT Open Courseware (40%) was the most popular MOOC website among the librarians. Many (53.3%) of those that enrolled expressed inactive participation. Lack of time (50%) was a major barrier to MOOC participation among librarians. The paper recommended that university as well as library management need to formulate strategies and programs that will promote active participation in MOOC among librarians.Keywords: MOOCs, Academic Librarian, Awareness, Use

A novel representation in three-dimensions for high dimensional data sets

Data representation is an important topic in the field of data engineering. In this paper, we focus on the representation of high dimensional data sets. We present the construction method of the set-valued mapping in 3-C representation and propose a novel representation algorithm based on K-means clustering method. The main contribution is to obtain the cluster centers of these high dimensional data sets, and get the correspondence coordinates in 3-C space with the projection along the center's direction. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, three sections of experiments had been completed. The first one is ten data sets from UCI. The second one is web images from Corel5k. The last one is the syllabus, a data set consists of text documents from the MIT OpenCourseWare project. All of the results can make sure that the corresponding similarity of data points or attributes are displayed clearly and show that the proposed algorithm's feasibility and scalability. Especially, the results on web images and syllabus are very excellent. As a result, the proposed representation algorithm in three dimension space will make significant influence on data classification and dimensionality reduction.

The LAI Lean Academy Experience: Introductory Lean Curriculum

This article reports on a decade-long undertaking to develop and widely deploy an introductory Lean curriculum. The origins, objectives, and history of the effort are summarized, as is the content of the core 3-day short course. Versions of the curriculum have been offered to over 1,600 participants in 60 short course and semester-long subjects taught by 45 different instructors in the United States and Latin America. Over 270,000 visits have been made to the curriculum posted on MIT's Open Courseware. Findings on the learning outcomes are presented based upon the extensive database complied from student feedback and self-assessment.

Prior-shared feature and model space speaker adaptation by consistently employing map estimation

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a speaker adaptation method that improves speech recognition performance regardless of the amount of adaptation data. For that purpose, we propose the consistent employment of a maximum a posteriori (MAP)-based Bayesian estimation for both feature space normalization and model space adaptation. Namely, constrained structural maximum a posteriori linear regression (CSMAPLR) is first performed in a feature space to compensate for the speaker characteristics, and then, SMAPLR is performed in a model space to capture the remaining speaker characteristics. A prior distribution stabilizes the parameter estimation especially when the amount of adaptation data is small. In the proposed method, CSMAPLR and SMAPLR are performed based on the same acoustic model. Therefore, the dimension-dependent variations of feature and model spaces can be similar. Dimension-dependent variations of the transformation matrix are explained well by the prior distribution. Therefore, by sharing the same prior distribution between CSMAPLR and SMAPLR, their parameter estimations can be appropriately regularized in both spaces. Experiments on large vocabulary continuous speech recognition using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) and the MIT OpenCourseWare corpus (MIT-OCW) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with other conventional adaptation methods with and without using speaker adaptive training.

教育コンテンツのネット公表に伴って必要な権利処理について MITオープンコースウェアをめぐる米国と日本の社会制度の違い

わが国の教育コンテンツのネット公表は，オープンコースウェア（OCW）やiTunes Uの仕組みの中で行われている。その仕組みは，クリエイティブ・コモンズ・ライセンスやフェアユースなど著作権（copyright）の保護と制限の考え方，すなわち，米国の社会制度の面からの理解・解釈による。米国と日本の社会制度の違いから，教育コンテンツのネット公表を進める上では，わが国の社会制度の視点からの法的・倫理的な権利処理が明らかにされなければならない。本稿は，放送大学教材の公表にあたって実際に行われている法的・倫理的な対応を踏まえて，わが国における教育コンテンツのネット公表に伴って必要となる著作権と関連権からの権利処理について論説する。

State-of-the-Art in Open Courseware Initiatives Worldwide

We survey here the state-of-the-art in open courseware initiatives worldwide. First, the MIT OpenCourseWare project is overviewed, as it has been the real starting point of the OCW movement. Usually, open courseware refers to a free and open digital publication of high quality university level educational materials that are organized as courses, and include course planning materials, evaluation tools, and thematic content, under a Creative Commons license. OCW is free and open, accessible to anyone, anywhere, and anytime via the Internet. The OCW initiative started in 2002, and it has been followed by many more programs that offer open access to courseware: Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, Harvard Medical School’s MyCourses, Webcast.Berkeley, Rice University’s Connexions, OpenCourseWare Consortium, Open Education Resources Commons, and The Saylor Foundation’s Free Education Initiative, along with other major open courseware projects worldwide. The prospects for futur development of open courseware are taken into consideration, while its potential to provide for both social construction of knowledge and for development of open educational models, and therefore for E-Learning 2.0 and Web 2.0 is emphasized.

An Online Alternative to Freshman Year

On average, the tuition and living expenses of traditional full-time undergraduate education programs total more than $15,000 per year at public universities, with much higher costs at for-profit institutions ([ 1 ][1], [ 2 ][2]). Three types of students are poorly served by this system: students who are so highly motivated that they could complete coursework independently, students who would be successful but are deterred by the cost, and students who are poorly prepared and invest the money to enroll in college only to fail. To meet the needs of these three groups of students, I believe that online options should be promoted specifically for freshman courses, which would allow students to begin college coursework without the financial burden. Introductory lecture courses that constitute much of the course load of a typical freshman experience are already widely available on the Internet for noncredit purposes from highly regarded research institutions such as Berkeley ([ 3 ][3]), MIT ([ 4 ][4]), and Yale ([ 5 ][5]), and they can be accessed free of charge by self-motivated learners worldwide. Such materials, with appropriate copyright permissions, could comprise essentially an entire freshman year virtual curriculum. Students' mastery of the material could be evaluated by secure examinations, perhaps the same advanced placement examinations already taken by man high school seniors to obtain college credits. ![Figure][6] CREDIT: UYEN LE/ISTOCKPHOTO A virtual course load would allow highly motivated students to complete the freshman year at a substantial cost savings before enrolling full time. It would lower the financial barrier to beginning a degree program for students with financial constraints. Students who are not sure whether they are ready for college-level work could also take advantage of this low-cost option to determine whether they need to improve basic skills before enrolling full-time to complete their degree. Of course, an online learning experience would not provide the benefits of a full educational experience, such as interaction with peers, teaching assistants, and senior faculty. Students will vary in their ability and willingness to undertake learning without the supportive resources that a traditional classroom and teacher provide, so online learning will clearly not be for everyone. Students who discover that the online learning environment does not meet their needs would still have the option to spend the time and money necessary to complete their freshman year in a more traditional and personal learning environment. 1. [↵][7]1. J. Lauerman , “For-profit college costs surpass nonprofit peers in U.S. study,” Bloomberg, 26 May 2011 ( ). 2. [↵][8]U.S. Department of Education, “U.S. Department of Education releases college cost lists to help students make informed choices,” 30 June 2011 ([www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-releases-college-cost-lists-help-students-make-informed-][9]). 3. [↵][10]webcast.berkeley, UC Berkeley's central service for online video and audio for students and learners around the globe ( ). 4. [↵][11]MIT Open Courseware ( ). 5. [↵][12]Open Yale Courses ( ). [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #ref-2 [3]: #ref-3 [4]: #ref-4 [5]: #ref-5 [6]: pending:yes [7]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1 in text [8]: #xref-ref-2-1 View reference 2 in text [9]: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-releases-college-cost-lists-help-students-make-informed- [10]: #xref-ref-3-1 View reference 3 in text [11]: #xref-ref-4-1 View reference 4 in text [12]: #xref-ref-5-1 View reference 5 in text

Toward an Open Source Poetics: Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Commons

Software programmers first introduced the term open source to describe a model of peer production in which users are free to access, modify, and collaborate on software code. Programmer and open source advocate Eric S. Raymond offers a useful analogy: whereas software had been previ ously built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards . . . working in splendid isolation, open source methods seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches.3 The term has since entered the lexicons of innumerable cultural disciplines to denote the permissible appropriation and modification of any technique, object, or model—both in digital environments and in tangible ones. Elements of this commons-based method of production can be found in Wi^ipedia, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Anonymous, urban communal garden proj ects, Ensembl's [sic| genome database, the BioBricks Foundation, and a host of nonprofit organizations4—leading Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to call for open-source society of shared social programming.5 Applied to literature, the term evocatively brings into focus a number of issues relating to authorship and intertextuality, intellectual property and the public domain, poetic license and collective artistic production. One might speak of an open source poetics or commons-based poetics based on a decentralized and nonproprietary model of shared cultural codes, networks of dissemination, and collaborative authorship.

Higher Education: the Future

More and more, higher education is transforming from closed, instructor-led classrooms to open, student-directed communities of learning. College-level content is accessible anywhere and anytime. Formal courses, such as those from MIT OpenCourseWare and the Open University (United Kingdom), are available to all of us. In addition, learning resources from collections such as the National Science Digital Library, Open Educational Resources, and Public Knowledge Project bring up-to-date information to the public. Wikipedia, YouTube, and Flickr convert and organize content into accessible formats for students from diverse learning, lingual, and cultural backgrounds. New communities in Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress facilitate sharing and discussions. Smart phones and other mobile devices bring content and people to students continuously. I believe these platforms and others will continue to transform the lives of college students, faculty, and others involved in science. Anyone wanting to discover new content and attempt new experiences will do so using emerging technologies, information, and experts from the Internet.

Topic tracking language model for speech recognition

In a real environment, acoustic and language features often vary depending on the speakers, speaking styles and topic changes. To accommodate these changes, speech recognition approaches that include the incremental tracking of changing environments have attracted attention. This paper proposes a topic tracking language model that can adaptively track changes in topics based on current text information and previously estimated topic models in an on-line manner. The proposed model is applied to language model adaptation in speech recognition. We use the MIT OpenCourseWare corpus and Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese in speech recognition experiments, and show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

How a New Generation of Teachers Will Change Schools

In September, I wrote about unprecedented opportunities for mass collaboration and action and how students can be enabled to be smart a group that, contrary to usual connotations of mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links (Rheingold 2002). It's almost common that youth use social media to share information, collaborate on projects of shared interest, organize, and socialize. But we often overlook how teachers are using these media to link up through loose networks of peers to develop their own teaching skills and to extend their reach beyond classroom. Many see social media as passing fad or something one does for fun. Social media are communications channel that opens world of possibilities and, in many ways, will become new operating DNA of incoming teachers and some of our current teachers. The web catalyzed ability of adults over age 45 to search and retrieve information and become informed consumers, citizens, employees, educators, parents, or learners. This was, and most often for me is, sufficient. But for those under age 26, web is no longer about idly surfing and passively reading, listening, or watching. They want to use web to share and socialize within loosely connected communities. Adults between ages 27 and 45 primarily use e-mail but are migrating toward using some social networking tools for communication (MediaBadger 2009). And according to Rapleaf, an Internet software company, women are at forefront of using social media (Hoffman 2008). Therefore, it should be no surprise that teachers are yearning for some form of connection by using social media. Teachers are self-organizing to share curricula through open educational resources (OER), educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and, under some licenses, to re-mix, improve, and redistribute. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been sponsoring high-quality open academic content, breaking down barriers to open educational content, and encouraging people worldwide to use OER because the world's is public good and ... technology in general and World Wide Web, in particular, provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge (Atkins, Brown, and Hammond 2007). Open educational resources include such content as course materials or content modules. While this field is growing, some web sites with open content include Connexions, The National Repository of Online Courses, Curriki, WikiEducator, MIT Open Courseware, and OER Commons. Connexions (www.cnx.org), for example, is web site where anyone can and share educational material made of small chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute. Connexions provides collaborative environment for developing, sharing, and publishing scholarly content on web. At OER Commons, teacher or learner can search open content by level or grade, subject area or issue, such as classroom management. Some of these sites make available curricula and other learning resources whose quality has been vetted by members or partners, while others encourage or rely on member contributions and depend on community to manage quality. OER can also include software or tools that facilitate using this open learning content. For example, some teachers are reaching out by using videos. TeacherTube (www.teachertube.com) allows anyone to upload and share personally created video about any topic or lesson without any external assessment. Teacher-Tube's goal is to provide an online community where teachers can share instructional videos. Online groups at TeacherTube include Math Geeks and Proud of It, specific high school groups, or districts. This is an example of establishing new digital medium through which to create learning experiences. …

Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability

In an attempt to understand the potential of OER for change and sustainability, this paper presents the results of an informal survey of active and inactive collections of online educational resources, emphasizing data related to collection longevity and the project attributes associated with it. Through an analysis of the results of this survey, in combination with other surveys of OER stakeholders and projects, the paper comes to an initial conclusion: Despite differences in priorities and emphasis, OER initiatives are in danger of running aground of the same sustainability challenges that have claimed numerous learning object collection or repository projects in the past. OER projects suffer from the same incompatibilities with existing institutional cultures and priorities that have dogged learning object initiatives, and they face the concomitant challenge of gaining access to the operational funding support that experience shows is necessary for their survival. However, through a review of one of the most successful of OER projects to date, the MIT Open Courseware Initiative, the paper ends by augmenting this significant caveat with a second, more hopeful conclusion: OER projects, unlike learning object initiatives, can accrue tangible benefits to educational institutions, such as student recruitment and marketing. Highlighting these benefits, it is argued, provides an opportunity to link OER initiatives to core institutional priorities. In addition to providing a possible route to financial sustainability, this characteristic of OER may help to foster the significant changes in practice and culture long sought by promoters of both learning objects and OERs.

The road to Free and Open Educational Resources at the University of the Western Cape: a personal and institutional journey

Free and Open Educational Resources at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) are deeply rooted in our institutional culture, stemming from the role we played in the struggle for political freedom in South Africa. The successful development of a strategy has been influenced by this history, as well as the role of a champion in the main decision‐making structures. There is little doubt that the brand recognition of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the originator of the ‘MIT Open Courseware’ initiative played a role in the acceptance of the strategy within the UWC. The focus at the UWC is on the benefits of freedom that include social justice, rather than solely on the utility benefits, hence the continued use of the term Freedom within the conceptualisation and the choice of licences consistent with that concept. Implementation of the strategy has to be sustainable within the institutional context, so the implementation of it is linked to the e‐learning tools that are in use at the UWC, which from 2009 will automate the sharing of courseware via a standards‐based repository. It is also linked to building sustainable institutional support through the activities of the eLearning Development and Support Unit of the university.

A step further

The ground-breaking launch of MIT's Open Course-Ware initiative (http://ocw.mit.edu) in 2002 marked a major shift in the paradigm of restricted access to academic materials. MIT decided to open its ~1800 courses to the general public, allowing free usage of course materials, syllabi, exercises, presentations and lecture notes for anyone who wishes to. Faculty members were encouraged to publish their study materials, and with a clever design and a sophisticated portal, achieved rapid publication and dissemination of course materials on-line. This new "Open Course-Ware" term sent a huge shock wave throughout the higher-education establishment.

Websites of note

Websites of note