# Comparison of Chinese Top Level Courses with MIT OpenCourseWare


This is far from the first study to compare the Chinese Top Level
Courses Project with MIT OpenCourseWare, there have already been a
number of Chinese papers;

> There have been a number of studies published in Chinese that compare
> MIT OpenCourseWare with the Top Level Courses Project. Wang Hongju
> (2009) sees the purpose of MIT OpenCourseWare as spreading quality
> resources throughout the world, whereas the Top Level Courses Project
> is aimed to increase communication internally between universities in
> China, and improve the quality of teaching. Together with Zhou Yan
> (2009) and Yang, Wang and Luo (2007) he also praises their unified
> technological platform, and what he describes as a very rigorous
> project evaluation methodology.

However, none of these papers employ any kind of theoretical framework
for their comparison, and they are also usually too eager to show how
far behind the West China is.

> While these papers all bring up interesting points, they are not very
> comprehensive comparative studies, and fail to employ any kind of
> framework or theory to discuss the two projects. They also
> consistently hold MIT OpenCourseWare up as a positive example, and
> portray the Top Level Courses Project as a weak copy in need of
> improvement. Instead of seeing the Top Level Courses Project as a weak
> copy of the MIT OpenCourseWare model, I would like to understand it on
> its own terms. I will first use the typology introduced in chapter two
> to analyze how the purposes behind these two projects differ. I will
> then use two different ways of conceptualizing OpenCourseWare as a
> framework to analyze the influence of MIT on the Chinese project, and
> finally discuss why the international community has reached misleading
> conclusions about the Chinese project.

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**Comparison based on typology of purposes**

The four categories [I listed in chapter
two](http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/09/17/categorizing-oer-based-on-four-purposes/)
were transformative production, direct use, reuse, and
transparency/consultation. In this section we will use these four
categories to look at the differences between the OpenCourseWare model
that was promoted by MIT, and now has been adopted by many other
universities around the world, and the Top Level Courses Project in
China.

Transformative production

The first category, transformative production, is the most significant
difference between the two models. There is no doubt that publishing
courses online will always have some impact on the people involved with
the course, but at MIT, this was never an explicit goal. There is no
selection procedure for courses, rather the goal is to have all courses
being produced. Rather than fostering reflection and engagement through
the creation of the OpenCourseWare courses, the procedure was set up in
a way to minimize the work-load for teachers – they just have to hand
over the material they were already using for classes to a group of
specially trained workers, who vet the material for copyright, and post
it online.

In the case of Japan, modernizing the lecture styles of professors was
mentioned as one of the motivations (see below), and it is possible that
universities in other countries also saw this as a way to make
professors more ambitious about their teaching methods, and perhaps
“learn from the example of MIT lecturers”. However, it is never
mentioned very explicitly in the justifications, rather the target is
always the creation of a collection of materials (which can be
classified according to the three next categories).

In China, however, the transformative effect of the production process
is one of the main, or perhaps the main justification for the project.
In chapters four and five, I have argued that the Top Level Courses
Project grows out of a long tradition of course evaluations and
competitions to select excellent units, which would receive extra
funding and act as examples for others. When discussing the goals of the
project, most of the concrete goals are related to the impact of the
production of resources, for example the creation of teaching-teams,
which is supposed to entice full-professors to teach undergraduate
courses, train young professors, and foster intra-collegial reflection
around the courses (something that has a long tradition in China, as I
noted a bit earlier). Different from MIT and projects in other
countries, professors in China are not supposed to submit snapshots of
what they are teaching right now, but go through a process of research
and refinement, improving both the teaching methods and pedagogy, and
updating the content.

The project also aims to increase the technological literacy of
professors, which will be reflected in their teaching towards their own
students, and to inspire a greater focus on quality, and educational
reform and innovation, not only among the professors directly involved
with the production of Top Level Courses, but by the entire departments
or universities involved. And when I interviewed professors and
administrators about the effects and impact the Top Level Courses
Project has had, both for individual professors, who have had a single
course designed as a Top Level Course, and for administrators who
assessed the impact on their entire institution, almost all the comments
I received were about the impact of the process itself.

This focus on the process can also be seen from the web resources
generated. We saw in chapter five that most of the courses had already
gone through several rounds of internal competitions to become excellent
courses. One of the main differences between the Top Level Courses
Project and evaluation projects that have come before it, is the
requirement to share resources online. However, the main purpose of the
website is to act as a platform for the application process, and the
website is assessed on how well it reflects on the course as it is
taught in a physical classroom, by looking at the teaching plan,
representative recordings of lectures, student evaluations,
justifications and reflections around the course by professors, etc.

This innovation enables a more efficient and standardized
review-process, involving blind peer-review by expert committees
consisting of faculty members from all over China. Once the designation
has been given, this same website which was used to apply, is then
opened up to the public, with very few modifications. The main
consideration in designing the website is therefore which materials are
necessary to properly evaluate the quality of a course taught in a
classroom, not which resources would be most useful to other professors,
or to distance learners.

Resources shared

If we look at the actual resources produced by the Top Level Courses
Project and the OpenCourseWare projects in other countries, there are
both similarities and differences. There is a very large diversity of
Open Educational Resources projects in existence, and I have chosen to
compare the Top Level Courses Project with the OpenCourseWare model
here, both because internationally it has been believed to be a kind of
OpenCourseWare, and because OpenCourseWare pioneered the publication of
an entire course as an open resource, or collection of open resources,
and this is similar to what the Top Level Courses Project produces.

In both cases, the result is one website per course, listing a number of
resources. Almost every course will have a course outline, often with
slides for each lecture, a reading list, and many will have
supplementary material, audio and video recordings of some or all
lectures, past exam questions, student works, etc. Top Level Courses
will usually be much more complete and refined than for example MIT
OpenCourseWare courses, and the effort that goes into production of the
former is far larger, however the principle is the same.

If we analyze this material using the three remaining categories from
our framework, we find that neither project is particularly suited to
direct learning by students. Course websites for both models are
designed to reflect the teaching that happens in a classroom, and have
not been designed for effective online or distance learning. This does
not mean that students do not use the course websites for this purpose;
it is certainly possible to learn a lot for someone who is an
independent learner, but it is clearly not the primary consideration
when the courses are produced.

The reuse category is where we find the largest discrepancy between the
OpenCourseWare model, and the Top Level Courses Project. Almost all
international OpenCourseWare projects use an open Creative Commons
license that allows others to download, modify, and redistribute
derivations of the material, as long as the re-distributor does not make
a profit. This means that although MIT’s courses might not be well
suited for distance learning “out of the box”, someone else can instead
repurpose parts of courses, and put them together into something quite
different – whether it’s an online course, a textbook or a documentary.
The most common example of this reuse is translation, which CORE has
been involved with. Granted, the resources published by MIT are not
ideal for reuse, because they are often published in file-formats that
are difficult to edit (such as PDFs), but the license at least allows
people to try.

In addition to this, the concept of reuse and derivation is frequently
promoted by the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which has hosted many
presentations on this topic at their annual conferences. On the other
hand, none of the copious literature on the Top Level Courses Project
mentions the possibility of reuse, and the courses are not licensed with
an open license that would permit this legally. This is not just
different from the OpenCourseWare model, but a deviation from the entire
Open Educational Resources movement, which would lead many Open
Educational Resources advocates to state that the Top Level Courses
Project could not be counted as an Open Educational Resources project.

When we examine the final category, transparency/consultation, we find
that the two projects are very similar. Both have the express purpose of
letting great courses inspire other teachers, and sharing best examples
of teaching and course design. In China, these are the best courses,
because they have been rigorously selected as such, and at MIT, the
courses are considered the best, because they all come from an elite
university. In addition to inspiring teachers at other institutions,
literature from both projects also talks about students using their
courses to better understand what is required by a certain major, the
courses promoting collaboration between different universities, etc. To
fulfill this purpose, it is actually a positive thing that the material
online closely reflects what goes on in the actual classroom, and has
not been extensively modified to be better suited for distance learners.

In this section, I applied the framework of four purposes which I
introduced in chapter two, and found that although the OpenCourseWare
model and the Top Level Courses Project are similarly poorly suited to
direct distance learners, and well suited to the purposes of
transparency and consultation, they differ radically on the two other
categories. The Top Level Courses Project has transformative production
as one of its main purposes, which is not even mentioned in the MIT
literature, whereas MIT OpenCourseWare courses are fairly well suited
for reuse, and this is encouraged, which is absolutely not the case with
Top Level Courses.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis "The Chinese National Top
Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote
Quality in Undergraduate Teaching" by Stian Håklev, University of
Toronto 2010.

-   Download this thesis:
  [PDF](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses/Haklev_Stian_201009_MA_thesis.pdf)[DOC](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses/Haklev_Stian_201009_MA_thesis.doc)
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  (Kindle)](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses/top-level-courses.mobi)
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