USU putting more course material online
Despite being on opposite ends of the country and specializing in vastly different areas – among other marked differences – USU and MIT still hang in the same ranks in one area.
With 80 courses currently posted, Utah State is second in the world in the amount of class material it shares using OpenCourseWare (OCW), a collection of digital content shared between various institutions and available to anyone with an Internet connection, said Brett Shelton, COSL director in the department of ITLS.
“OpenCourseWare is making available educational resources to students it wouldn’t normally be available to,” Shelton said.
MIT is first in the world because it requires all materials from all classes to be posted on OCW, he said, which is an expensive process. However, Shelton said, even though all of their course material is on the Web, free and open to anyone in the world with a modem, the value of an MIT education is not cheapened in any way.
“They believe the value of an MIT education is not in their materials but in the student-to-student interaction,” he said, “the interaction students have with their professors.”
Utah State has the same philosophy, he said; however, this should not take away from the value the OCW has to people around the world.
According to information provided by Utah State OpenCourseWare, more than 750,000 individuals have visited Utah State’s OCW site alone, accessing nearly 3 million lessons. While the U.S. is the country with the most users, a vast majority of Utah State OCW’s visits come from abroad, with China, India and Taiwan making up nearly 35 percent of those who use it internationally. Other countries represented include Zambia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Malaysia and South Korea, the Web site states.
Shelton said Utah State tries to focus on putting courses on OCW in classes MIT doesn’t offer and in which USU specializes, such as agricultural classes. He said the most popular courses from Utah State on OCW, though, are in economics. All materials are checked for copyright restrictions before being posted, and citations are used instead of quotations if such restrictions do exist, he said.
USU OCW was started four years ago by David Wiley, who is now teaching at BYU, and Marion Jensen, who is still directing the program. It was originally funded by a grant through the Hewlett Foundation and later received an additional grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Additionally, the program was granted a one-time funding by the Legislature to start OCW programs at the other six state-funded colleges and universities in Utah. With this coalition, called the Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance, more than 150 courses have been added, according to USU OCW information. Utah was the first state to use government funding to expand the OCW program, Jensen said. Other schools, including MIT, use only private funding, so the legislature’s funding grant was somewhat of a landmark, he said.
The OCW has many of the same goals as the original intent of Utah State University’s land-grant history, USU President Stan Albrecht said in a statement on the Utah State OCW Web site, ocw.usu.edu.
“In the tradition of land grant universities, Utah State University OpenCourseWare assures that no individual who is prepared and who desires the opportunity to advance his or her education is turned away,” Albrecht stated. “As we enter the 21st century, services like OpenCourseWare will enable land grant institutions to more fully accomplish their missions.”
Most universities are just beginning to discover OpenCourseWare and become involved, Jensen said.
“It’s a growing movement all over the world and in the states, too,” Jensen said, “and Utah State’s always been a leader in that.”
Unfortunately, even though USU had a head-start and has excelled in the OCW program – coming in ahead of such schools as Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Notre Dame – Utah State may be coming to a screeching halt, Jensen said. The funding and grants USU OCW has received in previous years are running out, he said, and without finding new options, the program will shut down on July 1.
“It’s like we pulled a hamstring,” he said.
Shelton said he and Jensen are working to find new options of funding the program.
“We’ve tried many different options to fund this and are still working on it,” Shelton said. “We won’t give up.”
The cost to put materials on the OCW site is very small when compared to the cost it already takes to prepare them for basic classroom use, Shelton said. The program has never been funded by any part of tuition, he said, so it is no burden to students to fund it. Shelton said the college of education, under which USU OCW falls, has been a great help in trying to figure out ways to sustain the program.
“It is a bummer when you consider all the accolades and visibility this program gets,” he said.
One of the biggest hurdles in trying to save the program is that few people on campus, or even Utah, know about it, Shelton said. Most of the traffic to the site comes from elsewhere, acting as the face of USU in places where other university programs can’t reach, he said. Because of this, Jensen said, it also acts as a great recruitment tool.
Jensen said prospective students Googling less common programs, such as instructional technology games, can find the OCW site in the first few results. This brings in students who wouldn’t have normally considered Utah State, he said. Current students can also use OCW as a resource when trying to choose classes or even majors, Jensen said.
Additionally, Jensen said if class information is on OCW, it will be there virtually forever, as opposed to WebCT whereon class materials are locked after the semester has passed.
“It’s a great resource to students,” he said.
Shelton said he uses OCW in his classes for this reason.
All in all, Shelton said OCW is really the embodiment of education as a philosophy. With OCW, people all over the world can be reached in ways not otherwise possible, he said.
–lisa.m.christensen@aggiemail.usu.edu