# The impact of MIT's OpenCourseWare model on the Top Level Courses Project


In this thesis, I have tried to show that the Top Level Courses Project
is a unique Chinese answer to national challenges, and not an imported
model. When the centralized curriculum, which was introduced through
borrowing from the Soviet Union in the 1950’s, was gradually loosened up
in the 1980’s, it was replaced with a system of course evaluations to
promote quality and maintain a central direction for courses. As these
systems of course evaluation became increasingly sophisticated and
widespread, the Ministry of Education embarked on a number of major
projects to select excellent universities and faculties through
peer-review processes for extra funding, and to serve as examples to
others. Adding the explosion of enrolment beginning in 1998, and the
ministry’s strong desire to promote increased use of IT in education, a
new national program that would evaluate the best courses, and share
these using an online platform is a natural development of the different
trends that already existed.

However, China does not exist in a vacuum, and during the same time, the
MIT OpenCourseWare model was developed, and became highly publicized,
within China as in many other places. Many articles have been published
in China, both introducing the OpenCourseWare project in general terms,
and comparing the OpenCourseWare project with the Top Level Courses
Project (as mentioned above). To analyze how the OpenCourseWare project
could have had an impact on the Top Level Courses Project, we need to
decide on how to conceptualize the OpenCourseWare project.

OpenCourseWare as a norm

One way of conceiving of the OCW concept is to see it as the normative
ideal that all universities should digitize and open access to their
course materials. The Hewlett Foundation (2006) states the normative
idea thus:

> At the heart of the movement toward Open Educational Resources is the
> simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good
> and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular
> provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and
> reuse knowledge. OER are the parts of that knowledge that comprise the
> fundamental components of education content and tools for teaching,
> learning and research.

But for our purposes, let us suggest the norm that “universities should
make their educational material openly available”. Finnemore and Sikkink
(2005) have developed a theory of norm life-cycles, and used it to
analyze the spread of women’s suffrage and the land-mine ban, among
other activist movements. As opposed to a realist view of the world,
where each nation only looks after their own best interests, they hold a
constructivist view that advocates for the possibility of creation and
spreading of norms in a global context. They define a norm as “a
standard of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity”.
Norms are learnt through social learning, or through contestation, and
lead to a change in identity and internal values and motivation, ie.
they are transformative (Checkel 1999).

According to Finnemore and Sikkink (2005), norms are created by norm
entrepreneurs, who are critical to a norm’s emergence, because they call
attention to the issues, and use language that “names, interprets and
dramatizes them”. These norm entrepreneurs need some kind of
organizational platform to stand on especially at the international
level, and indeed, in order for a norm to reach a threshold and move
towards a cascade, it will often have to become institutionalized in a
specific set of international rules and organizations.

A cascade occurs after a tipping point has been reached, typically
comprising a third of all states. Finally, the norm becomes
internalized, and sometimes it can become so institutionalized that
people follow it blindly, without reflecting on the consequences.
Finnemore and Sikkink (2005, 913) use the international state system as
an example of a norm that has become internalized beyond reflection;
“actors no longer think seriously about whether ‘‘the state’’ is the
best or most efficient form of political organization (it almost
certainly is not). They just set up more and more states to the
exclusion of other political forms.”

MIT and Hewlett could certainly be said to play the role of a norm
entrepreneur, and together with UNESCO, they have spent a lot of energy
framing open education in a way that will make it attractive to other
actors. They also attempt to spread the model through international
advocacy networks, using OpenCourseWare Consortium as a platform, and
they have defined minimum standards that institutions have to fulfill,
to be eligible to join – a minimum of 10 courses, and the use of open
licenses, for example. And in fact, one might even see a parallel to the
internalization of the idea, at least within the movement, where people
are frantically trying to convince every single university to make
OpenCourseWare, without stopping to think about whether that is the best
use of resources in all cases.

So if OpenCourseWare represents a norm, has this norm had any impact on
the Top Level Courses Project? I would argue that it has not, based on
three reasons. Firstly, one of the core normative values behind
OpenCourseWare and most Open Educational Resources projects is openness,
which includes using an open license. However, the Top Level Courses
Project does not require courses to use an open license, and in fact I
have not come across a single course that uses an open license (and on
being questioned, course authors all said that they would not allow
reuse and repurposing of their materials – one of the basic concepts
within the global open education movement).

Secondly, much of the impetus behind the project comes from the
idealistic notion that educational resources should be available to all,
and to spread access to people who do not have it today. However,
despite the fact that university enrolment is still lower in China than
in major Western countries (even after the process of massification),
increasing access to education is never mentioned, whether in official
documents, or by my informants. The Top Level Courses Project aims to
increase quality for those already in the system, not to reach people
who do not currently have access. The task of providing expanded access
is entrusted to other initiatives, such as Open University of China (Wei
2008).

Finally, if the norm mentioned above had had any impact in China, we
would expect to see a range of different experiments with making
educational resources freely available, both by individual professors
and by individual universities, like the case in North America or other
regions of the world. This has not been the case – other than the Top
Level Courses Project, which was initiated and funded by the Ministry of
Education, there are very few examples of academics voluntarily sharing
resources. One of the only exceptions is the SocialLearn Lab network
started by Professor Zhuang Xiuli at Beijing Normal University
(SocialLearnLab 2010). Given these reasons, I find it hard to conclude
that OpenCourseWare has had much impact in China as a norm.

Openness as a policy innovation

In the previous section, I have presented the open education movement as
essentially idealistic and normative. However, in addition to choosing
to share one’s resources freely because of an ideological conviction;
utility and pragmatic considerations count as other very important
factors. I will first discuss how this factor plays out in the wider
open movement, and then look at examples that pertain to OpenCourseWare.

It is easy to understand why users would be attracted to free resources,
but why would producers, whether they are software companies, or
universities, benefit from waiving their rights, and making their
products freely available? The fact is that many large commercial
companies have open-sourced their own software, or have engineers that
contribute to outside open-source projects. Hecker (2000) runs through a
number of reasons why commercial companies would want to open-source
their products, and discusses different business models that can make
this process sustainable (see also Behlendorf 1999). Widening the scope
to encompass many open practices, Tapscott and Williams (2006) outline a
number of innovative business practices that allow corporations to
benefit from opening access to their internal processes and intellectual
property, leveraging peer-to-peer collaborators and “prosumers”.

How does this apply to OpenCourseWare – are there good pragmatic
arguments for a university to open access to its course materials,
without having recourse to moral arguments? The MIT Evaluation Report
lists a number of examples of how MIT OCW has benefitted MIT as an
institution (MIT OpenCourseWare 2005). OpenCourseWare can help in
recruitment, which is shown by the fact that 35% of freshmen aware of
OCW before deciding to attend MIT were influenced by it in choosing
which school to attend, and a large majority of alumni believed that it
strengthened MIT’s reputation (p. 52, 60). It can also be very useful
for existing students, who according to the report use the courses
extensively to catch up or repeat classes, and plan their course of
study (p. 50).

Even faculty find it useful to be able to consult other colleagues’
work. One interesting example of this is professor Karen Willcox who
teaches astronautics, a course that requires a strong foundation in
maths. She was dismayed by the poor level of math skills, and realized
that she did not know what was taught in the math course that was
required for entry to the astronautics course, or how the material was
presented. Through the OCW site, she was able to review the material,
and can now help the students make explicit links between her material
and the pure math that they have previously studied (ibid., p. 58). In
the same vein, when the OpenCourseWare Consortium tries to help faculty
members and students “sell” the idea of OpenCourseWare to their
administration and other faculty, they list a range of direct benefits
to institutions, rather than appealing to moral and ethical values
(OpenCourseWare Consortium 2010b, 2010c, 2010d, 2010e).

If we consider OpenCourseWare not as something that is normatively good,
but as something that is pragmatically useful to an institution, or a
state, then it is much easier to make the case for OpenCourseWare having
had an impact on the Top Level Courses Project. While it is very
difficult to define exactly the extent to which OpenCourseWare helped
trigger the development of the Top Level Courses Project in exactly the
form it exists today, many of the perceived benefits of MIT that were
listed above are echoed by the professors interviewed in chapter five.
Through my interviews and literature review, I found that people working
in the education sector were very well aware of MIT OpenCourseWare and
other open projects, but professors in other disciplines who had courses
that were selected as Top Level Courses knew very little about it.

Tan Feng (2008) believes that the Top Level Courses Project was China’s
response to the MIT project, and it is certainly possible that given all
the underlying trends and problems discussed above, the 2001
announcement of MIT’s grand plan, and it’s positive reaction, functioned
as some sort of trigger to create the Top Level Courses Project. This is
strengthened by Phillips’ (2004) theory of policy attraction, which
proposes that states will be more likely to borrow policy during times
of political change, systemic collapse, internal dissatisfaction,
negative external evaluation, new configuration and alliances, knowledge
and skills innovation, or the aftermath of extreme upheaval – the
explosive growth in enrolment during the period of massification could
thus have made China more open to borrowing ideas from the outside.

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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.

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