The Consortium is pleased to announce the addition of two new Sustaining Members:
Organisation international de la Francophonie (OIF)
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)
To learn about sustaining members of OCWC please click here.
New Institutional Members
The Neusoft Institute of Information, Nanhai is a higher education institution located in the city of Foshan, Guangdong Province, one of the most dynamically developing regions of China. The School is known for its information technology intensive curricula. It offers currently full-time education in the academic areas of Computer Science and Technology, Information Technology and Business Administration, Digital Media and Arts, Applied Foreign Languages, and Internationalization-oriented Education. It is dedicated to providing an integrated learning experience that holds internalization, practicality and innovation in high regard.
The Neusoft Institute of Information Nanhai (NII Nanhai) actively supports, participates in and promotes the OCW movement in particular, and the open education movement in general. For instance，the school has established the International Open Course (IOC) initiative as an important component of the integrated learning system of this institution. It is the institutional commitment to continuously introduce, analyze, reengineer, implement and promote open educational resources available worldwide. The IOC initiative not only appreciates and utilizes the rich and diversified open learning material and platforms from the global ecosystem of Open CourseWare (OCW), Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and other open educational advances to enable, empower and enrich our curricula with respect to the institutional education objectives, but also learn and adapt universally effective and relevant education methodologies and best practices for the progress of students and faculties. The IOC initiative intends also to share and promote our achievement in open education within China and abroad. It plans to contribute its own open curriculum material to the global OCW community.
The IOC initiative is facilitated by the Center for Curriculum Development (CCD) of the school in terms of promotion, coordination and guidance, and is participated in and implemented by various academic departments across the school. A dedicated web-based IOC learning portal with considerable OCW learning resources has already been set up for the internal usage of the students and faculties. In the current Fall Semester for the 2013-2014 academic year, a total of 10 courses in different curricula are designed and taught based on the international OCW and MOOC resources. In the Spring Semester of the 2012-2013 academic year, a total of 9 courses and 1 lecture seminar based on OCW were offered. These OCW courses are from top research universities and other diversified types of institutes and organizations. IOC courses embedded in curricula are popular among and highly regarded by the students and faculties.
- SeoulTech, South Korea
While we are recognized for our renown Engineering, Science, and Technology programs, we also have stellar Business and Management programs, including our new College of Techno Business Fusion, a School of Architecture, a college of Humanities and Social Sciences, and a College of Arts and Design, which has just moved into its brand new, state-of-the-art building. To match these high quality programs, we are blessed with outstanding students. The resulting combination sets SeoulTech apart from other major universities because we consistently rank at the top in full-time employment of graduates (top ranked for 4 consecutive years: 2009 – 2012). The underlying foundation, which makes this possible, is our premier research and instructional faculty. Our Professors are ranked 12th among around 200 Korean universities, in terms of articles published in international journals per capita in 2012 (according to the JoongAng Daily Newspaper).
SeoulTech makes OCW available via KOCW.
The College of Southern Maryland (CSM) in La Plata, Maryland, USA, is a public, regional community college, serving Southern Maryland’s Charles, St. Mary’s, and Calvert counties. It offers 120 programs of study including Associate of Arts, Associate of Science, and Associate of Applied Science degree programs.
Furthermore, CSM offers a wide range of continuing education certificates and career training programs such as computer programming and repair, truck driving, nursing or veterinary assistances to name a few.
CSM would like to join forces with all the community colleges that are making use of open educational resources to enhance their educational programs. We are planning to start by using and promoting OCWs and hopefully soon be able to produce and share our own.
- ETH Zurich, Switzerland
ETH Zurich is one of the leading international universities for technology and the natural sciences. It is well-known for its excellent education, ground-breaking fundamental research and for putting its new findings directly into practice. It offers researchers an inspiring working environment and its students a comprehensive education. Founded in 1855, ETH Zurich today has some 18,000 students from over 100 different countries, 3,800 of whom are doctoral students. About 500 professors currently teach and conduct research in the areas of engineering, architecture, mathematics, natural sciences, system-oriented sciences, and management and social sciences. ETH Zurich regularly appears at the top of international rankings as one of the best universities in the world. 21 Nobel Laureates have studied, taught or conducted research at ETH Zurich, underlining the excellent reputation of the institute.
For years ETH Zurich has supported the idea of open educational resources. It encourages faculty members to produce and use open content in the context of their web-based teaching activities, ranging from small courses in learning management to MOOCs.
Some of our current activities include the following:
1. Online Courses at ETH Zürich, many of which are accessible without password or an access can easily obtained: http://ethonline.ethz.ch
2. We developed the service docendo (open source) to enable easy sharing of open resources (a meta-initiative). It supports Licensing under cc, cooperative Work on resources, etc.:
http://www.docendo.org/index.php?id=406
http://docendo.let.ethz.ch
3. ETH TORQUE-Portal: courses open for all students at Swiss universities
https://moodle-app2.let.ethz.ch/course/index.php?categoryid=32
4. ETH MOOC on edX
https://www.edx.org/course/ethx/ethx-amrx-autonomous-mobile-robots-1342
5. Specific Projects:
GITTA: http://www.gitta.info/website/en/html/index.html
Klimaweg: http://www.klimaweg.ethz.ch
The International Telematic University (UNINETTUNO) is an Italian based distance teaching and learning university established in 2005 (Decree of 15 April 2005 by the Italian Minister of Education, University and Research).
UNINETTUNO was created from NETTUNO, a consortium of 43 Italian and foreign public universities and was established to further the success of the Med Net’U – Mediterranean Network of Universities project consisting of 31 partners belonging to 11 Mediterranean countries (Algeria, Egypt, France, Jordan, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey). All partners worked together and created a true technological network based on receiving and transmitting digital satellite technologies. The Governments of the partner countries supported the creation of UNINETTUNO. UNINETTUNO rapidly became the leading university in which prestigious lecturers from important European and Mediterranean Universities deliver their courses in several languages and in various faculties including engineering, philosophy, conservation of cultural heritage, law, economics, psychology and communication sciences. Teaching and learning is carried out in 6 languages: Italian, French English, Arabic, Greek and Polish.
UNINETTUNO is one of the most active European universities in the field of Open Education Resources (OER). Recently, we launched UNINETTUNO OpenupEd, UNINETTUNO MOOCs, on the UNINETTUNO web portal (http://www.uninettunouniversity.net/en/MOOC.aspx). We started working on OER about 20 years ago before with the digital satellite channel Rai Nettuno Sat where university courses and lectures are broadcasted according to a weekly schedule and at night on RAI-2 (the second channel of the Italian public television). Adding of our new project, UNINETTUNO OpenupEd, seemed natural considering that the mission of our University is the democratization of access to knowledge through new technologies. This new initiative, with 120 free university courses in 4 languages (Italian, English, Arabic and French), offers everyone the opportunity to follow courses and lessons from the best university teachers. We launched also many other OER projects:
1. Arabic writing to the population of Morocco. The course is broadcasted every day on the Moroccan Public television and on RAI NETTUNO SAT.
2. Vocational training course for the young Iraqi entrepreneurs, launched with the UN and the Republic of Iraq (e-learning platform).
3. The web TV of the university (www.uninettuno.tv) where people can watch on demand thousands of video contents like seminars, interviews, workshops on art, culture, philosophy, mathematics, religion, politics, peace and more. Creative Commons (CC) is the license for MOOCs and OER. For the web TV it depends on the authors. Some are CC and some are restricted. All our projects could be shared and implemented within the OCW Community worldwide.