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Another well-known OER initiative is OpenCourseWare (OCW), started by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall of 2002. The OCW website launched as a
pilot program with the help of $11 million from the William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W.
Mellon foundations (and $1 million from MIT). It contains free lecture notes, syllabi, reading lists,
course calendars, exam and quiz questions (and some answers), labs, and some video lectures for
undergraduate and graduate courses available online at no cost, accessible to anyone. And its the
primary goal is to provide the content that supports and education (Kirkpatrick 2006; Lerman and
Miyagawa 2002; Lerman et al. 2008).
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MIT faculty are not required to post materials, but the
participation rate has been extremely high, 75 percent as of November 2005 (Lerman et al. 2008). At
its launch, the site contained 50 courses and, currently, there are over 2,000 courses posted. Today,
over 100 institutions have partnered with MIT OCW.
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Regarding OCW, it is also relevant here to mention OCW Consortium (OCWC), “a
collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from
around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model,”
launched in 2003.
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The mission of the OCWC is “to advance education and empower people
worldwide through opencourseware”; in other words, the OCWC is to advance formal and informal
learning through the worldwide sharing and use of free, open, high-quality education materials
organized as courses (Bays 2009). In general, by participating the OCWC members benefit from
gaining “a public repository of [their own] curriculum materials and making them accessible
worldwide,” which will “encourage faculty to share pedagogical ideas, curriculum materials, and tools
and to discover common interests and concerns. Many institutions have reported that their
participation in the OCWC has accelerated the use of learning management systems as faculty better
grasp the potential of digital curriculum materials.”
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Another significant OER project is MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for
Learning and Online Teaching), a web-based resource development by California State University
(CSU) implemented in 1997.
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MERLOT is a no-fee digital library and interactive (“user-centered,
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It should be noted that the MIT OCW materials are open source, but the content management system (CMS) used to
maintain the site is not. Because the site grew too large for programmers to handle the hand-coded HTML with
Deamweaver software, they were forced to use a CMS that would work with their large-scale goals for the OCW
program (Kirkpatrick 2006: 55).
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http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/about/history/index.htm (accessed March 13, 2009).
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http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ (accessed March 13, 2009). Also, Bays 2009, slide 6.
Today, OCWC includes worldwide member and affiliate institutions, including Open University in the UK, a leading
edge provider of OCW through OpenLearn. The University of Michigan is an affiliate member of OCWC. In general,
“[i]nstitutional members commit to publishing, under the institution's name, materials from at least 10 courses in a
format that meets the agreed-upon definition of an opencourseware,” while “[af]filiate members either publish courses
in an area other than higher ed. (e.g. corporate training or K-12) or engage in activities that further Consortium goals
(e.g. software development, translation, distribution or regional support).” (Bays 2009, slide 12).
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Open Course Ware Consortium: Proposal for UMB’s participation, v.12/15/06, p. 2, available at
http://ocw.umb.edu/about/test-course/sample-syllabus
(accessed March 13, 2009).
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In 1997, the California State University Center for Distributed Learning (CSU-CDL at www.cdl.edu) developed and
provided free access to MERLOT (www.merlot.org)
. In 1998, a State Higher Education Executives
Organization/American Productivity and Quality Center (SHEEO/APQC) benchmarking study on faculty
development and instructional technology selected the CSU-CDL as one of six best practices centers in North America.