Fen-Den Wang and Catherine Ngugi

Barriers to the Distribution of Open Content

Fun-Den Wang, CORE and Catherine Ngugi, African Virtual University
Thursday, September 29, 2005, 11:00-11:45 am

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Fun-Den Wang of China Open Resources for Education (CORE) and Catherine Ngugi of African Virtual University (AVU) will explore challenges faced by their organizations in localizing and distributing content from MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT OpenCourseWare collects the materials used in MIT classes—including lecture notes, syllabi, homework, exams and more—and publishes them openly on the web for reuse by educators and learners around the globe. Publication on the OCW site, however, is only the first step in making these educational resources available to many audiences. CORE has worked closely with the MIT OCW staff in the past three years to translate OCW content into Simplified Chinese and also to provide local copies of English-language content to overcome technical access constraints. Similarly, AVU has worked in partnership with MIT OCW to provide local access to OCW content in Sub-Saharan Africa.

About MIT OpenCourseWare—MIT OCW is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. With 1,100 courses published as of June 1, 2005, MIT OCW has published materials from more than half of MIT’s courses and includes materials from approximately 70% of MIT’s faculty. MIT OCW expects to have published materials from all 1,800 of MITs courses by 2007, and will continue to update course content from that point as an ongoing activity of the Institute.

About CORE—China Open Resource for Education—is a non-profit organization. Her mission is to promote closer interaction and open sharing of educational resources between Chinese and international universities, which CORE envisions as the future of world education. Together, CORE and MIT have brought OCW to China. CORE has developed partnerships with international organizations and Chinese universities to enhance higher education in China, promote open sharing of educational resources in China, and share Chinese OCW globally. It achieves this through a variety of programs including establishing Lead Universities, translation, quality control, localization, and utilization of open educational resources. CORE most values open sharing and partnership and will assist the Chinese universities to share alike.

About AVU—The African Virtual University (AVU) is an innovative educational organization established to serve the countries of Africa. The objective of the AVU is to build capacity and support economic development by leveraging the power of modern telecommunications technology to provide world-class quality education and training programs to students and professionals in Africa. After a successful pilot phase, AVU has been transformed from being a project of the World Bank to an independent reputable Inter-governmental organization based in Nairobi, Kenya with over 34 Learning Centers in 19 African countries.