China OpenCourseWare, originally initiated by MIT and the Hewlett Foundation, came to China in September 2003, when MIT and the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) joined together with
Beijing Jiaotong University to organize an OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing. As a result of this conference, petitioned the government to institute a program of OpenCourseWare in China. This group included some of the most prestigious universities in China, as well as the
Central Radio and Television University, which is China's central open university, with more than students. As a result of this petition, the Chinese government instituted the CORE (
China Open Resources for Education) to promote OpenCourseWare in Chinese Universities, with
Fun-Den Wang (the head of IETF) as chairman. The CORE is an
NGO supported by the
Hewlett Foundation, IETF and other foundations. According to CORE's website, it has nearly 100 Chinese universities as members, including the most prestigious universities in China, such as
Tsinghua University,
Peking University and
Shanghai Jiaotong University. This organization organized volunteers to translate foreign OpenCourseWare, mainly MIT OpenCourseWare into Chinese and to promote the application of OpenCourseWare in Chinese universities. In February 2008, 347 courses had been translated into Chinese and 245 of them were used by 200 professors in courses involving a total of 8,000 students. It also tried to translate some Chinese courses into English, but the number is not too much and some are only title translated. There have also been produced 148 comparative studies comparing MIT curriculum with Chinese curriculum using the MIT OpenCourseWare material. CORE's offices are hosted within the China Central Radio and Television University, and they receive partial funding from the IETF and the Hewlett Foundation. The website has been offline since 2013. But before the OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing and the establishment of CORE, on April 8, 2003, the
Ministry of Education had published a policy to launch the
China Quality Course (精品课程) program. This program accepts applications for university lecturers that wish to put their courses online, and gives grants of between per course that is put online, and made available free of charge to the general public (ibid.). The most prestigious award is for the "national level CQOCW", then there is "provincial level" and "school level". From 2003 to 2010, they produced 3862 courses at the national level by 746 universities. According to the official website for the China Quality Course, the total number of the courses available online is more than 20,000. These typically include syllabus, course notes, overheads, assignments, and in many cases audio or video of the entire lectures. The scale of this project has also spurred a large research activity, and over 3,000 journal articles have been written in Chinese about the topic of OpenCourseWare. The
UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE) has been promoting
Open Educational Resources (OER) in China. Cul-studies.com provides culture studies and teaching in China under a Creative Commons license run by Contemporary Culture Studies (CCCS) of the Shanghai University.
China Quality Course China Quality Course is a program launched by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China since April 8, 2003. From 2003 to 2010, 3862 courses had been produced at the national level by 746 universities.
Malaysia University of Malaya (UM) is the foremost and premier Research University (RU) in Malaysia. It is a multidisciplinary RU that has more than 27,000 students and 1700 academic staff with 17 faculties and research centres that covers the whole spectrum of learning from the Arts, Sciences and Humanities. The university's beginning at the Kuala Lumpur campus dates back to 1959 and has graduated over 100,000 people, including leaders in various fields.
Pakistan The
Virtual University (Urdu:ورچوئل یونیورسٹی; Vu), is a public university located in urban area of Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. Its additional campus is also located in residential area of Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. Established in 2002 by the Government of Pakistan to promote distance education in modern information and communication sciences as its primary objectives, the university is noted for its
online lectures and broadcasting rigorous programs regardless of their students' physical locations. The university offers undergraduate and post-graduate courses in business administration, economics, computer science, and information technology. Due to its heavy reliance on serving lectures through the internet, Pakistani students residing overseas in several other countries of the region are also enrolled in the university's programs.
India The
National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) is a Government of India sponsored collaborative educational program. By developing curriculum-based video and web courses, the program aims to enhance the quality of engineering education in India. It is being jointly carried out by 7 IITs and IISc, Bangalore and is funded by the
Ministry of Education (previously Ministry of Human Resource Development) of the Government of India. Flexilearn is an open course portal. It was initiated by
Indira Gandhi National Open University, and apart from providing free course materials, allows students to appear for the requisite exam conducted by the university and receive certification. All previously operational local chapters are now collectively offering courses under
SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds). This is done through a platform that facilitates hosting of all the courses, taught in classrooms from Class 9 till post-graduation. All the courses are interactive and free of cost to any learner. Nine national co-coordinators are appointed, which also includes NPTEL, i.e., course work by Indian engineering institutes headed by
IIT Madras. The courses hosted on SWAYAM are in four quadrants – video lecture, specially prepared reading material that can be downloaded and/ or printed, self-assessment tests through tests and quizzes and an online discussion forum.
Japan OpenCourseWare was introduced and adopted in
Japan. In 2002, researchers from the
National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) and
Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) studied the MIT OpenCourseWare, leading them to develop an OCW pilot plan with 50 courses at Tokyo Institute of Technology in September. Later, in July 2004, MIT gave a lecture about MIT OpenCourseWare at Tokyo Tech that prompted the first meeting of the Japan OCW Alliance. The meeting was held with four Japanese universities that had mainly been recruited through the efforts of MIT professor Miyagawa, and his personal contacts. In one case, the connection was the former president of the
University of Tokyo being an acquaintance of
Charles Vest, the former president of MIT. In 2006, the OCW International Conference was held at
Kyoto University wherein the Japanese OCW Association was reorganized into the
Japan OCW Consortium. "In order to become an integral institution that contributes to OER, the JOCW Consortium needs to forge solidarity among the member universities and build a rational for OER on its own, different from that of MIT, which would support the international deployment of Japanese universities and also Japanese style e-Learning." Maktabkhooneh partners with Iran's top universities, mostly
Sharif University of Technology,
University of Tehran,
Amirkabir University of Technology,
Tehran University of Medical Sciences and so on. There is more than 200 courses available on Maktabkhooneh for free. The "
ocw.um.ac.ir ()" is an online educational platform in
Iran which provides free online courses from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran. The motto of the ocw.um.ac.ir is "Making Accessible Excellent High Quality Education For Every Iranian for Free". ocw.um.ac.ir partners with Iran's top professors of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and so on. There is more than 200 courses available on ocw.um.ac.ir for free.
Israel The
Open University of Israel has been a member through its Pe'er initiative since 2008.
Taiwan Led by the
National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan started organizing several open course plans, the main organization is named
Taiwan open course and education consortium (
Chinese: 台灣開放式課程暨教育聯盟). The plan attracted the
National Taiwan University,
National Chengchi University,
National Taiwan Normal University, and others into the development of project.
United Arab Emirates In the United Arab Emirates, a discussion, led by Dr. Linzi J. Kemp,
American University of Sharjah, has begun about sharing teaching and learning materials (‘open course ware’) through a community of educators and practitioners in the GCC. There is growing availability of high quality and free open access materials shared between universities e.g. MIT (USA). Resource sharing also takes place on the ‘Open University (UK), OpenLearn’ platform. Kemp (2013) proposes that teaching and learning will be enhanced when teachers across institutions of higher education work together to bring their shared knowledge into classrooms. Furthermore, when the platform is opened up to include practitioners - e.g. employers - then the relationship with the industry will further ensure that the teaching and learning is available and beneficial for a wider community. ==Europe==