Royal Roads OpenCourseWare Pitch
Mary Burgess states that the Royal Roads OpenCourseWare venture would have both an altruistic value and a benefit to Royal Roads University. I think it is difficult to argue with the altruistic benefit of sharing knowledge and promoting informal learning. As an EVA, I believe that people would still pay to be accredited and to receive instruction. I don’t think that there is a problem with competition from members of the OpenCourseWare consortium because OpenCourseWare is offered for free and to benefit from the venture it isn’t necessary to lead people away from using OpenCourseWare offered elsewhere for free (such as MIT) to get them to use Royal Roads OpenCourseWare for free. Furthermore, from what I can see, for the most part Royal Roads and MIT offer different kinds of programs and I’m not sure that there would be much direct competition between them.
The intention to make Royal Roads courseware available for free online indicates confidence in its value, a sense that its quality speaks for itself. It is possible that being able to see the course material before enrollment may attract potential students and possibly prospective faculty, but it would be difficult to establish this kind of cause and effect relationship by looking at the experiences of universities in the OpenCourseWare consortium because there are many factors that can affect student enrollment. I agree that offering courseware for free could enhance the reputation of Royal Roads.
I have questions about what the venture would involve. Is it just a matter of posting course syllabi and handouts online and advertising that they are available, or will it involve creating new content such as videos of lectures, podcasts, and so on? The answer to this would have consequences for the cost of the venture, its viability, and how excited I would be about it. As other EVAs have mentioned, there are also questions about who would be involved in the venture and what their qualifications are.
My main concern is with the issue of licensing. Much more would need to be said about copyright issues and how likely the creators of course content would be to get on board with the project. Other EVAs have mentioned that it isn’t clear what the audience for this pitch is. If it is to faculty, who would be concerned about their intellectual property, then, as a faculty member, I am not persuaded that people will not steal my course content just because from a legal standpoint they should not steal it.
4 comments
1 Jeff Laird { 09.17.09 at 7:02 pm }
I have to back up your last statement. Generally, OCW is licensed under Creative Commons as Burgess mentions. She suggests that this will protect against “third rate hack” institutions from taking the content and selling it as their own. However, CC does allow this – the content must be kept open but their is nothing to stop the “third rate hack” institution from accrediting students with another institution’s courseware and offering cut rate tuition because they do not have to invest in R & D (RRU or MIT has already done it).
2 Erik Van Dusen { 09.17.09 at 7:56 pm }
You wrote:
“I have questions about what the venture would involve. Is it just a matter of posting course syllabi and handouts online and advertising that they are available, or will it involve creating new content such as videos of lectures, podcasts, and so on? The answer to this would have consequences for the cost of the venture, its viability, and how excited I would be about it.”
This what I was trying to get at with my last reply to your comment. MET, for example does a decent job of providing prospective and current students a general sense of course content and teaching methodologies through their website. I suspect this is would be much cheaper than developing a sophisticated open course delivery. These details are missing from the pitch.
Great post!
erik
3 davidp { 09.17.09 at 9:21 pm }
At MIT, and at other institutions with a similar interest, OCW is a faculty-driven initiative. The Creative Commons license protects the intellectual property (copyright) in the work and specifies how it can be used.
“In 1999, MIT Faculty considered how to use the Internet in pursuit of MIT’s mission—to advance knowledge and educate students—and in 2000 proposed OCW. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, containing 50 courses. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines. Going forward, the OCW team is updating existing courses and adding new content and services to the site.”
I recommend some background reading to temper the commentary:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
d.
4 Ernest Pao { 09.19.09 at 10:55 pm }
I must agree with you, fellas. There isn’t any mention of the target audience in the pitch. Furthermore, what does opencourseware entail or ‘look like’? As Stuart suggested, is it just a syllabus that is posted for perusal or is it more like prospective students have limited access to, say WebCT, and can “look around”?
Ernie
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