What is OpenCourseWare to UW-Eau Claire?
The OpenCourseWare Project at UWEC is a student led initiative to exhibit UWEC’s unique educational experience. Over the last 2 years, we have been collaborating with the Provost’s Office, Admissions, LTS, various faculty members, the OpenCourseWare Consortium, and the Student Senate. OpenCourseWare has been implemented and utilized successfully at universities worldwide to benefit higher education on a university, local, national, and global level.
The mission of this project at UWEC is to provide prospective students, current students, the media, other field experts, and various interested individuals the opportunity to easily preview and experience what makes our faculty and university unique.
OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials organized as courses. Educational materials may include but are not limited to:
- PowerPoints
- Syllabi
- Video
- Resources (articles, research data, relevant links)
- Instructor Blogs
Who is involved in OpenCourseWare?
Currently, over 80 universities are successfully using OpenCourseWare worldwide. Included in these Universities are some of the most prestigious around the United States, such as, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and Notre Dame. Smaller OpenCourseWare programs like the University of California-Irvine also exist. There are many more supporters of the OpenCourseWare initiative as they work to develop and implement their own individual projects.
Benefits of OpenCourseWare to UW-Eau Claire
• Builds global and regional awareness of our institution
• Improves recruitment to our institution
• Builds publicity of unique contributions by faculty members
• Improves web resources available for all users
• Complements educational and research resources for current students
Frequently Cited Concerns (adapted from OCW Consortium Toolkit)
- Attendance - "My students won't come to class if the lectures are online" is the form in which this concern is most often expressed. The goal in responding to this concern is to encourage faculty reflection on effective teaching methods. Putting lectures online enables faculty to treat the lectures as part of a student's preparation for class. This allows students to spend in-class time actively engaging the course content. If faculty members explain this at the beginning of the academic term, students will come to class.
- Drain on Faculty Time - While it is not unheard of for faculty to prepare their own courses for OCW publication, projects generally employ staff or students to vet materials for Intellectual Property issues and to format them for online use. This leaves the faculty member in the role of consultant: answering questions and reviewing the prepared course prior to publication. OCW processes may inspire faculty to spend more time improving their courses. OpenCourseWare can help faculty with regular improvements and updates to classes.
- Faculty Resistance to Sharing - Often, faculty members and academic leaders regard their primary course materials as the "crown jewels" of the instructional program – the essence of what they offer to students, the products that generate tuition revenues, and the substance of what they publish in textbooks. Supportive faculty members at other institutions have demonstrated that the value of course materials actually increases as those materials are freely shared.
- Cost - There are ways to build an OCW project to fit budgets of many sizes. OCW at UWEC is a student funded, student driven, and collaborative project that relies on the coordination and work of dedicated students and staff instead of a large budget.
- Erosion of Distance Education Revenue - Institutions with Distance Learning Programs often are justly concerned that providing free versions of their courses online will discourage students from enrolling for credit. What we have found, however, is that OCW sites provide students with an important pathway into for-credit coursework.
- Intellectual Property - Addressing Intellectual Policy issues is complicated, but it often is more a matter of good record keeping than anything, and a number of tools are in development to help streamline the process. Many more people are willing to share their third-party content than might be apparent at first, and many are thrilled to get the exposure.
- Undermining Potential Publication for Profit - Most faculty are realistic about their likelihood of making much in the way of royalties from their published works. That being said, as long as for-profit publication remains a significant part of the tenure and promotion process, faculty will be concerned about undermining their efforts to secure such publication. Fortunately there is evidence that OCW publication in fact promotes the sale of related faculty publications, as it widens the market for those publications, increases name recognition and demonstrates uses to which those publications might be put in the classroom.
Interested? Questions? Please contact any of the following students for more information!
- Tim Lauer (lauertd@uwec.edu)
- Andrew Cooan (cooanaj@uwec.edu)
- Jacob Kampen (kampenja@uwec.edu)
