Stanford OpenCourseWare Proposal

Purpose/Motivation
Provide free, open access to world-class learning material for anyone

• Good of Society
  Knowledge is transformative.
  A more knowledgeable, more skilled, and more cultured society is in the interest of everyone. With OCW, universities can be satisfied that they’ve fulfilled a large part of their moral obligation as cultural-intellectual hubs to reach out and improve society.
• Leveling the Pedagogical Playing Field
  Education should not discriminate.
  OCW allows access to educational material with no strings attached – access irrespective of location, history, social and economic status, age, etc.
• Freedom, Dissemination of Knowledge
  Knowledge deserves to be free.
  In order for world-class research to reach its full transformative potential, it must be widely available and widely disseminated. OCW allows these materials to escape the restrictions of publishers, schools, and other proxies who would make knowledge a commodity and profit from its scarcity.
• Change and Public Review
  Challenge what you know.
  Only after insuring its validity and robustness can cutting-edge research be used as a foundation for further investigation. OCW would subject research to public scrutiny of the most intense, effective kind. In addition, it would challenge the traditional approach to teaching in universities, with the potential to modernize education inside and outside the university in ways that are seldom seen.

Plan

• Create web pages with research, testimonials, and other arguments that make the case for OCW in major universities.
• Create a web-based application that manages various types of media (i.e., documents, images, video, audio, and other files) and arranges them by lecture, course, and department, along with other information: instructor, course description, source credits, etc.
• All material published on OCW sites is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Content is typically offered as-is and without feedback from an instructor.

Audiences

• Global audience
  Except for content management system, access to the site should be open to anyone and well publicized.
• Self-selecting audience
  Though main pages on the website should be written for a broader audience, course content need not and should not be altered when published as open courseware.
• All areas of study
  OCW could easily accommodate courses in all areas of study, though some would benefit more from dialogue between the student and the instructor.

Common Concerns

• Faculty may not wish to cooperate.
  The OCW initiative at MIT has shown great willingness among faculty members to contribute. Stanford faculty have also expressed interest in offering open course materials on the internet, though further research into faculty opinion at Stanford is pending. Currently, the OCW consortium only requires that 10 courses be made available online from each participating institution.
• Material may be neglected or become outdated or inaccurate.
  Provided minimal support staff and an effective online feedback system, OCW site content should remain accurate and updated. Outdated information with no available updates can simply be hidden. Further, one of the central motivations of OCW is to collect this sort of feedback and eliminate inaccuracies in existing course material.
• The learning experience is best when it involves dialogue between the student and the instructor.
  Video lectures, handouts and exercises go a long way for most classes and most students. In any case, having these is infinitely better than having nothing for students without access to a Stanford education.
• Some class material cannot be published online or under the Creative Commons license.
  This material would not be included on the OCW website.
• Licensing issues are complicated by open publication on the web.
  In truth, it’s difficult to pinpoint licensing violations in any media, although the web does, in general, make it easier or more tempting to commit them. The CC A-N-S license encourages distribution and modification of licensed materials as long as they are given proper attribution, not used for commercial purposes, and offered under the same license in turn. This is a relatively lax, well-regarded license which has worked well for internet media. It is so simple to comply with the license that most will cite and not bother to violate it. Any material that requires greater insurance or stronger copyright protection should be excluded from OCW.

Viability

• Cost of Implementation
  
  • An effective implementation can automate many of the chores of maintaining an OCW website. In most cases class documents are already scanned or offered digitally for distribution on Coursework, so maintenance costs can be reasonably small.
  • Philanthropic organizations like the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have funded OCW initiatives. These and others would likely we willing to donate to OCW at Stanford.
• Benefits to School and Faculty
  
  • Greater esteem among peers and the public, especially for being among flagship OCW contributors.
  • Higher profile for school and faculty work.
  • Increased peer review of materials.
  • New venue for community outreach activity that is steadily becoming a prerequisite for government and private research funding.

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Klaus Ganser
27 Apr 2007