iBerry

As time passes and yet more universities and colleges jump onto the OCW bandwagon I see a far greater variation in the OCW on offer. MIT has always offered material that ranges from very sketchy 'highlights' to superlative videoed presentations with comprehensive notes and fully-documented assignments but now some HE institutions are really plumbing the depths with thinly disguised advertising comprising little more than course descriptions and topic lists. (In some cases I've even found no tangible OCW at all!) Because OCW is offered without charge I think there has been a tendency among users to be less than critical but OCW has been a great success story in terms of promoting these institutions, otherwise would they continue to encourage the co-operation of their hard-pressed academic staff? I think the time has come to be rather more hard-headed about acceptable OCW.

It's difficult to be precise but I would expect an acceptable OCW item to offer the learner a coherent learning experience with sufficient benefit to advance him or her up the educational scale in some non-trivial way. I would normally expect an OCW item to have well-defined topics and a significant amount of associated descriptive and explanatory material of one sort or another aimed at an appropriate class of learner. (This is in contrast to Open Educational Resources (OER) which I see as a catch-all term for anything in the way of digitized learning products - diagrams, photos, exams, quizzes, software packages etc etc.) Anything else risks reducing accessibliity and I fear that some material now on offer will actually discourage learners because its limitations are not apparent at the outset and the process of finding this out can be time-wasting and frustrating.

We have always tried to exercise a degree of quality control on the OCW items that we list and now we will try even harder to maintain standards. There is no way we can we can track all OCW but we will try to ensure that what is included is, first and foremost, of the greatest benefit to learners. Anyone, including OCW authors and educators, can help by commenting on OCW items (you don't have to register), suggesting new items or contacting us directly.