18 November 2006 //
Notre Dame OpenCourseWare Newsletter
Fall 2006

FIRST EIGHT COURSES AVAILABLE

On September 20, 2006 the Notre Dame Opencourseware Pilot Project officially launched its website at: http://ocw.nd.edu.

On that site are our first eight courses:

AFAM 33302
Faith and the African American Experience
Hugh Page

ARCH 50611
Nature and the Idea of a Man-made World
Norman Crowe

HIST 30800
African American History II
Richard Pierce

MELC 20040
Islamic Societies of the Middle East and North Africa: Religion, History, and Culture
Asma Afsaruddin

PHIL 10100-2
Introduction to Philosophy
William Ramsey

PHIL 10100-1
Introduction to Philosophy
Paul Weithman

POLS 30228
Terror, Peace, and Other Inconsistencies
George Lopez

THEO 10001
Foundations of Theology: Biblical and Historical
Gary Anderson

These courses represent fifteen different departments (several are cross-listed offerings) and demonstrate a range of responses to the OCW opportunity. Take a moment to look over the rich content these pioneering faculty members have made available, then join us in thanking them for their generosity.

SITE LAUNCH EVENT SEPTEMBER 20

On September 20, 2006, the Notre Dame Opencourseware Pilot Project celebrated the launch of its website with a mini-conference entitled:

the ardent search for truth
and its unselfish transmission . . .

Speakers included VP and Associate Provost Dennis Jacobs, MIT OCW Executive Director Anne Margulies, and OCW faculty contributors Norman Crowe and Asma Afsaruddin. If you were not able to be with us in September, you can still catch the video at: http://ocw.nd.edu/About/site-launch-highlights.

FIRST MONTH'S SITE USAGE

The numbers are in! Notre Dame OCW received approximately 250,000 hits (not counting usage by OCW staff) in its first month (9/20/06 - 10/19/06). The highest numbers of visitors were attracted by MELC 20040—Islamic Societies of the Middle East and North Africa: Religion, History, and Culture. While 92% of our users are visiting the site from servers in the US, the remaining 8% are from places like Italy, Mexico, Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Belgium, Germany, France, Japan, Netherlands, Canada, Brazil, India, Switzerland, Thailand, Spain, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, Poland, Malaysia, Czech Republic, and Israel.

WHAT ARE WE UP TO?

In this space you will find different accounts of the Notre Dame Opencourseware Community: user case studies, tips for course producers, news from Opencourseware Consortium Meetings, and more. Since this is our first issue, we thought it would be appropriate to start with an overview of Opencourseware as a movement.

Let us begin with a definition: an opencourseware is a free and open digital publication of high quality teaching materials, organized as courses. It differs from distance learning initiatives by offering neither credit nor contact with faculty and by requiring no fees. Unlike materials placed by individual faculty members on their individual websites, it comes with assurance that materials have been vetted for intellectual property issues and that they will remain in place over time. In addition, the course-centered format provides the user with a context within which to process any given piece of material.

The Opencourseware movement was started in April 2001, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology responded to the challenge of online learning with a pledge to put all of its course materials on the web, free and open to the public. MIT OCW < http://ocw.mit.edu> has now published over 1400 courses, with new and updated courses scheduled for publication in 2007. MIT has been a leader in the effort to bring other schools into the movement, and in the fall of 2005 that effort led to the formation of the Opencourseware Consortium.

The Opencourseware Consortium (OCWC) is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world. View the OCWC website at http://ocwconsortium.org. Consortium members have committed to the contribution of at least ten OCW courses from their institutions. These members are joined by a number of affiliate organizations that concentrate their energies on activities that further Consortium goals, such as translation and other distribution.

The mission of OCWC is to create a broad and deep body of open educational content using the shared opencourseware model. Growth of the consortium has been so rapid that we are now offering over 2900 courses and 370 translations worldwide. Since only half of the current members' sites have gone live so far, we can expect those numbers to increase dramatically over the coming months.

For Notre Dame, having an opencourseware means many things. First and foremost, it means faithful stewardship of our intellectual resources by sharing them with those who need them. Beyond responsibility, however, lie a number of opportunities:

• to showcase the unique talents of our faculty, attracting the attention of potential students and collaborators
• to allow alumni access to the academic as well as the athletic life of Notre Dame
• to present models of teaching excellence within individual disciplines.

Taking these types of opportunities is crucial to Notre Dame's continued efforts to be recognized as a preeminent research university with a distinctive Catholic character. We look forward to the exploration of these and other possibilities.