TU Delft OCW Seminar

posted on Oct 11, 2009 by in Congressen en Symposia, OpenCourseWare

Last friday TU Delft organised the TU Delft OpenCourseWare Seminar. Because the board meeting of the OpenCourseWare Consortium was held in Delft on Wednesday and Thursday, we had an interesting programme with an international audience. We had visitors from Finland, Japan, South Africa, US and The Netherlands.

The programme started with the introduction by Anka Mulder. She is director of Education & Student Affairs at TU Delft, but also boardmember of the OCW Consortium. After the introduction it was my turn to go into detail about what OpenCourseWare (OCW) is and how it fits into the Open Movement. I was also asked to tell some about the different OCW-models around the world. When I was preparing for the presentation I was thinking abouth clustering the different models. After some time I thougth that there were 2 main differences in models:

From single institution to multiple institution approach
From content focus to community focused approach.

This let to the image below:

Interesting is that I haven't found an OCW-website that organised by multiple institutions and community focused. The future of OCW is in that direction: multiple institutions working together with learners in a community creating courses.

The presentation can be viewed on Slideshare and will be available soon on our videoserver Collegerama.

Watermanagement
After my presentation, Jasper Verberk (assistant professor at our Watermanagement department) gave a very good overview of the benefits they see for publishing their courses on OCW.

Our Bureau OpenER (Cora and Martijn) presentated our OCW-project and the future development, including a sneak preview of the new website of TU Delft OCW.

National and internationa developments
TU Delft is not the only institution that has a live OCW-website. The OpenUniversity was the first one in The Netherlands. Robert Schuwer presented about this project and some related projects they are working on. Andreia from OpenUniversity UK followed the seminar via the live stream and she mad a very nice post about the presentation of Robert.

After Robert, the new director of the OCW Consortium, Mary-Lou Forward had an interesting presentation. She compared the OER-movement with a universal, virtual library.

The characteristis of a library are very similar to OER:

Repository of knowledge
Archives materials
Evolving hub for knowledge
Houses different collections
Serves a variety of users
Users can select what is relevant to them
Compliments formal education
Community center
Public good

Within the universal, virtual library OpenCourseWare is just a collection.

After the lunch Anka Mulder interviewt three OCW Consortium Boardmembers:

Steve Carson, President of the Board and working at MIT
Yoshimi Fukuhara, from Japan OpenCourseWare
Mary-Lou Forward, Director of the OCW Consortium.

It was an interesting discussing with the three boardmembers and the audience. One of the discussion was the added value of a national OCW Consortium. Yoshimi emphasized that their national consortium is essential for the success of OCW in Japan. Especially because of the language barriers they have with the international community.

After the discussion TU Delft's Vice President Education Paul Rullmann presentated the views of the Executive Board. He is completely committed to OpenCourseWare. He said: 'It's not a question if you involve in this, it's how fast you get involved'.

Twitter
During the conference there was a vivid Twitter backchannel with the hashtag #OCWTUD. To see an overview of the tweets, you can look ath this blogpost.

Conclusion
It was an interesting seminar with a good programme and interesting discussions. It gave me a lot of energy to further develop our TU Delft OpenCourseWare. I hope that this seminar helps to further expand the OCW-community in The Netherlands and in Europe. I'll keep you posted.

1 comment

Comment from: Thieme Hennis [Visitor]

Interesting is that I haven’t found an OCW-website that organised by multiple institutions and community focused. The future of OCW is in that direction: multiple institutions working together with learners in a community creating courses. >> something which can be seen online, are so-called “referatories", such as MERLOT and OERcommons.org, where content of different OER and OCW repositories is aggregated and supported with tools (rating, comment, personalization, etc.). Curriki and Connexions also offer possibilities to include links from other repositories, next to being a collaborative platform for the creation and management of open educational resources. Free and open source, and I am sure that many different institutions and teachers are on those platforms making new content… hence: community centered and by multiple institutions (but no explicit support by multiple institutions).

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