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Over the past decade, the online space has become a free repository for college-level course materials called OpenCourseWare (OCW).

Pioneered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, OCW can help college students explore a potential major, plan out their programs of study, and get another perspective on a particular homework problem or concept. Independent adult learners can enhance their knowledge of a subject for academic or real-world applications.

Choices, uses abound

MIT has gone from posting 500 courses in 2003 to the current 2,000, and traffic to its OCW site also is also on the rise. According to Steve Carson, external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare, the number of unique visitors reached 1 million in October. Although MIT intended OCW to be used mainly by professors, just under one in 10 users are academics, while 42 percent are university or college students and 43 percent are independent learners.

"It's attracting a huge audience and in some ways, a very surprising audience," Carson says."We didn't set out to create a distance learning program. What we discovered is lots of people are coming to the site for independent learning purposes."

According to the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which has 300 university and organizational members worldwide, including MIT, the audience for OCW varies depending on a user's location. In China, for example, half of the users of the Netease OCW site are in their 20s, while in the U.S. Half are over 30, says Meena Hwang, the OCW Consortium's director of communication and community outreach.

Meanwhile, Spanish and Portuguese-speaking universities have established their own consortium to grow OCW; the South Korean government is offering grants to 20 universities based in part on their having OCW projects; African Virtual University is an effort to develop short video clips to train teachers in English, French and Portuguese; and APTIKOM is a group of 700 computer science departments in Indonesia that are collaborating on a program to certify students who complete OCW.

Good for almost any subject

Although MIT's courses lean towards science and technology, Notre Dame and Yale have established strong OCW beachheads in the humanities, while Tufts and Michigan are known for their medical materials, Carson says.

"It's a little more of a challenge to capture humanities courses, although we try to include student papers and videotape field trips and classroom activities, or [post] image galleries of projects to try to capture them better," he says.

Interest in certain subject matters varies by world region, with Indian and Pakistani users more often clicking on engineering courses and Chinese users favoring liberal arts and humanities, Hwang says.

Benefits, drawbacks

OCW's main advantages are that it's free and available to anyone with Web access. In China, where Netease attracts 1.2 million unique visitors a day, users see OCW as a way to learn English, find out more about the study abroad experience and establish their own study groups, Hwang says.

The drawbacks of OCW include not being able to take courses for credit and the inability to interact with the professors who create the materials.

"Half of the feedback is 'how do I get credit for this?'" Hwang says. "The interest is definitely there."

Some 1.4 million users have printed out certificates of completion from Brazil's Fundacion Getulio Vargas, but the document is for "self-recognition" only, Hwang says. However, some institutions are working on a plan to establish an "informal university" around OCW.

Quality control

Let the user beware about the quality of OCW, which is largely unregulated. The consortium is in the process of setting up a ratings system for its content, but also notes that because it requires a school's name be attached to its materials, the onus is on the participants to ensure they are releasing a sound product.

"Basically, you're putting the reputation of your school at risk," Carson says. "Publishing openly has its own peer pressure attached to it."

How schools benefit

MIT has seen numerous benefits from OCW––one in three incoming freshmen say it has influenced their decision to attend. It also encourages faculty to update their courses.

"Most have five or six things they've been meaning to do to a course, so they polish it up," Carson says. "80 percent go to the site when creating new courses to see what fellow instructors are doing."

OCW also has helped drive traffic to University of California, Irvine's, formal distant learning and continuing education programs, and led Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands to receive grants to develop OCW for other institutions.

"You are being recognized as a leader in the field once you do OCW," Hwang explains.

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