You Are Already in Worldwide Class
You Are Already in Worldwide Class
  • Reporter Park Seo-kyung
  • 승인 2013.04.10 16:30
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At this moment right where we are, we can listen to justice of Michael Sandel, physics of Walter Lewin, death of Shelly Kagan, even Stanford University’s special lecture of the late Steve Jobs. The Open Course Ware (OCW) movement has enabled us to audit famous courses from anywhere in the world.
The OCW movement was started by MIT in 2001. By publishing educational materials from its courses freely and openly on the Internet, it serves society, shares knowledge, and increases students’ learning ability and professors’ lecture competitiveness. Started from 46 regular courses, MIT OCW serves 2150 courses from 35 departments now. Modeling MIT OCW, world famous 200 universities such as Harvard University, Yale University participate in organization of OCW Consortium, which shares educational materials consisting of more than 13,000 videos in 20 languages. Above this, there are representative institutions like UNESCO, GLOBE, ARIADNE foundation, and LORNET.
Like this, universities of the world endeavor to enhance excellence of E-learning by publishing and sharing their contents. Besides aspects of serving society and increasing quality of education, OCW also is powerfully promoting universities. According to MIT OCW 2011 Report Summary, there were an estimated 90 million visitors as of Oct 2011. Twenty-eight million OCW video and audio files have been downloaded through iTunes U, and 24 million YouTube views recorded. Moreover, 56% of OCW traffic is non US.
Korea is also following the suit. Sookmyung Women’s University, SungKyunKwan University, SNU, and others share lectures through their independent OCW cite. Moreover, Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development in Korea founded KOCW (Korea Open Course Ware) service which now lists 4552 regular courses from 139 universities in Korea.
In the case of POSTECH, five departments belong to WCU (World Class University); Department of Creative IT Excellence Engineering, Division of Advanced Materials Science, Division of Integrative Biosciences and Biotechnology, Division of IT Convergence Engineering, Division of Advanced Nuclear Engineering, uploaded lectures in KOCW. Since WCU invites famous foreign professors, the original plan based on government policy was to publish lectures for all see. Therefore, 74 courses, including lectures of great scholars who have visited POSTECH, are listed now. However in terms of POSTECH, the OCW movement is insignificant. Even though the site ‘JiSik Nanum’ exists, it focuses on supplement for undergraduates’ study and is not published to public. Additionally, independent OCW site hasn’t been opened. Professor Moo Hwan Kim, the chief professor of Division of Advanced Nuclear Engineering said, “in my opinion, if professor himself wants to share good lecture for all, it could be made public, and the university and government have to prepare infrastructure for this”. Sharing knowledge, enhancing education efficiency and quality, and promoting excellent education and reputation of POSTECH effectively might all be achieved through OCW.