# Reading MIT OCW Case Studies and Evaluation Report


As noted in my OpenEd 4 submission, I really wanted to read the [MIT OCW
Case Studies](http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/global/MITOCW_Case_Studies.pdf)
and the [MIT OCW Evaluation
Report](http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/global/05_Prog_Eval_Report_Final.pdf),
and today I finally found time. The Case Studies are easy to locate, but
the evaluation report was actually quite hidden.

I had a look at the case studies before, and they are all pretty much
glorious - not a single negative comment, so very much a piece of
marketing. They are also not very specific, although most of them are
about educators who adopt some of the material for their own class. The
evaluation report is quite long, but it’s actually just a web site
statistics printout, interspersed with comments, as well as some
findings from interviews and surveys. If you wanted how many people from
a specific domain accessed a specific subpage, while using Firefox
version 2.0 on Linux - this is a goldmine. The qualitative data seemed
rather haphazardly interspersed though, mostly to break up the
statistics.

I would have liked to see references to more research - for example they
mention that CORE is doing very impressive work in China, but with no
reference - I would love to know more both about the translated MIT
content is being used in Chinese universities, and about the impact and
process of Chinese universities themselves publishing lectures. I found
two interesting resources though.

![](http://worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/DCARead?standardNo=1599043017&standardNoType=1)One
is a book called [Globalized e-learning cultural
challenges](http://worldcat.org/oclc/68624107%3Cbr) by Andrea Edmundson,
which contains an article by the Taiwanese translators of MIT OCW,
talking about the process and challenges [OOPS](http://www.myoops.org/)
had in translating the MIT courses into Chinese, and a number of other
articles that look interesting. I’ll order it on InterLibrary Loan, but
have to wait a while, because I have a lot of books coming in for my
thesis.

The other was a mention on the CORE website about a [research
competition](http://www.core.org.cn/en/news/2007/070820.htm), giving
grants to several students to do research on OCW and OER in China. The
first batch is in, and will be published soon on the CORE website. I
will be looking forward to reading these - wish there was somewhere I
could sign up to be notified, since I might well forget to check back.
They are also announcing new scholarships for people interested - if you
know about anyone doing OER research in China, let them know.

Through the CORE website, I also came across an OER I haven’t seen
mentioned in any of the readings -
[](http://www.pitt.edu/%7Esuper1)SuperCourse, an OER resource on medical
topics.

As for the things I took away from the evaluation, an interesting point
was that although most lecturers were positive, a few were worried,
either because a future book-deal might be imperiled, or because\

> “I feel the need to make the material more polished for publication on
> OCW. I see this as a\
>  obstacle for rapid improvement of my lecture material.” (Music
> faculty)\
>  “Having highly polished course materials be the norm discourages
> innovation in thecurriculum.” (History faculty)\

Reading all the case studies of different schools around the world
incorporating the material into their classes - in some cases quite
wholesale - also did make me a little bit uneasy about this “educational
imperialism”. Sharing knowledge is great, but if that results in all the
universities in the world becoming mirror copies of MIT, that’s a blow
to diversity. In the report, they say that UNESCO’s OER conference
concluded that MIT’s OCW would be a boost to local production of OCWs in
universities around the world - and I guess the CORE example in China
really holds this up. I’d love to see these different OCWs exchange
information and resources - what about integrating the video lectures
with [dotsub](http://www.dotsub.com/) so that they can be
collaboratively subtitled? I found a bunch of [Chinese video
lectures](http://www.archive.org/browse.php?field=subject&mediatype=education&collection=chinese_u_lectures)
at [archive.org](http://archive.org),
including a whole series on [Chinese Culture in Russia and
France](http://www.archive.org/details/humanities54). I am sure French
people would be very interested in seeing the episode on China Fever in
France in the 18th Century - a Chinese talking to Chinese about how
Chinese were seen in France, how very meta.

One final thing I wanted, is to comment on something a teacher at MIT
said about how MIT OCW allowed her an insight into what her colleagues
were teaching, and through better understanding what they specifically
taught in the math courses, she was able to relate it explicitly to her
own engineering courses for her students. I’ve often thought about
whether professors ever audit other professors’ classes, whether because
they want to learn, or because they are curious about the teaching style
and what not. I suspect it’s rare, which is unfortunate. This goes into
my whole argument about pedagogics and teaching in higher education -
which is something I am constantly exploring, and might be writing more
about.

Stian