The photo above includes some notes from the “Open Access at University - OpenCourseWare and Beyond” afternoon working group session at yesterday’s IS2K7 conference.

This session provided an opportunity for participants to learn more from Anne Margulies about MIT’s OpenCourseWare project and some of the opportunities and challenges.

Here are some of my notes from the working group:

Should open access be considered as part of the original mission of university?

Once MIT started publishing the raw materials, students were not as concerned as they were in the beginning. 32% of students said that open access (OA) led favorably in their decision to go to MIT. It was the alumni who spoke the loudest, concerned about the money they spent on acquiring their degrees, now content would be free for everyone.

The OA consortium is comprised of over 150 institutions, mainly non-U.S. schools.

Intellectual property is still the biggest problem with OA at MIT. When they use third party material they can not publish it. It is not as complete as it could be.

Q: Has the OpenCourseWare project (OCW) had effect on the attendance of lectures?

A: (Anne) This was a major concern. The faculty were concerned so OCW at MIT surveyed them. The faculty had not noticed a significant drop in attendance. They are able to use their class time in a different way, because students can get the material outside the class.

The students do come with interesting questions in mind. For this reason, OCW has had a positive impact at MIT.

Q: How will this impact career building among faculty? how does it impact tenure?

A: We’re starting to bring agencies together to make peer review part of the deal.

Q: How do you generate publicity for these initiatives?

A: (Anne) We don’t do it very well. We’ve been passive about it and as a result, we’re only scratching the surface for those who can benefit from this material.

About two years ago there was a big amount of traffic from MIT to our site. Indeed MIT students used the site regularly about 70%. 40% of faculty used the OCW site to check what their colleagues were teaching and to make sure the pre-reqs were met so that their students were learning.

MIT faculty are much more aware of what other faculty are learning and they are learning best practices in informal ways. OCW at MIT has connected faculty, which in one instance helped create a new course out of two faculty members who were both interested in the same disciplines.

Marketing and PR that have had positive experiences with OCW - look to students for this (blogging, etc.). Elizabeth Stark said educating faculty is key - students can help.

There are a large number of course websites that are made public. Need the agreement among faculty to make these websites open. And that faculty (need to) improve their websites.

Some of the tenure binders have references to the quality of their OCW site and the impact of their site outside of MIT. Early adopters got all kinds of positive feedback and praise. They saw they that were contributed to their field and the word spread, and the tipping point happened where students asked “Why aren’t you publishing this material in an open way?”

We found many gems and treasures that we’re investing in k-12 websites, but no good examples. Teachers can’t find anything that meets those standards.

Let the teachers know really early on what the benefit is for them and it might help speed the uptake of other profs.

OCW at MIT is based on eduCommons developed at Utah State U.

Q: What has Sloan’s response to OCW at MIT?

A: (Anne) They’ve got courses up there (on OCW).

There is a way to export from proprietary platforms (courseware) into EduCommons or another platform. So the teaching site is very dynamic.

Moving forward/Outstanding Issues:

• Creating communities around disciplines, educational networking sites.

• Do we want every course that’s taught or do we want courses of certain qualities?

See working group session wiki for more.

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