# Case studies of OpenCourseWare in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea


*In this post, I will introduce the development of OpenCourseWare
projects in three Asian countries that are close to China both
geographically and culturally. I will later use these examples to show
why it was easy for foreigners to misunderstand the developments within
China.*

---

## Japan

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Screen-shot-2010-11-30-at-12.51.08-AM.png)](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Screen-shot-2010-11-30-at-12.51.08-AM.png)

Already in 2002, researchers from the National Institute of Multimedia
Education (NIME) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT) went to study
the MIT OpenCourseWare project, and this led to an OpenCourseWare pilot
plan with 50 courses at Tokyo Institute of Technology in September
(Kobayashi and Kawafuchi 2006). Later, in 2004, people from MIT gave an
invited lecture about MIT OpenCourseWare at Tokyo Tech in July 2004, and
after that, the first meeting of the Japan OpenCourseWare Alliance was
held with four Japanese universities. These had mainly been recruited
through the efforts of MIT professor Miyagawa, and his personal
contacts. In one case, the connection was the former president of Tokyo
University being an acquaintance of Charles Vest, the former president
of MIT (Makoshi 2006).

Subsequently, in 2006 the OpenCourseWare International Conference was
held at Kyoto University, and at that conference, the Japan
OpenCourseWare Association was reorganized into the Japan OpenCourseWare
Consortium (Kobayashi and Kawafuchi 2006). By 2010, they had 1285
courses in Japanese and 212 courses in English, with 23 university
members, including the United Nations University (JOCW 2010).

The motivation for joining the OCW movement seems to have been to create
positive change among Japanese universities, including modernizing
presentation styles among lecturers, as well as sharing learning
material (Makoshi 2006).

## Taiwan

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Screen-shot-2010-11-30-at-12.52.33-AM.png)](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Screen-shot-2010-11-30-at-12.52.33-AM.png)

In Taiwan, it all began with the translation of MIT OpenCourseWare
courses, which was organized by Lucifer Chu. He is well known in Taiwan
for being the translator of the Lord of the Rings, and he used the
royalties from this work to fund what would later be called the
Opensource OpenCourseWare Prototype System (OOPS). In February 2004, the
entire MIT OCW site was copied to a local server hosted in Taiwan, and a
network of volunteer Chinese-speakers from Taiwan, China and other
countries collaborated on translating the courses to Chinese. In late
2006, the project secured a grant from the Hewlett foundation, and in
June 2007, OOPS hosted its first international conference on OCW and
e-learning in Taiwan (Lee, Lin and Bonk 2007).

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Screen-shot-2010-11-30-at-12.51.33-AM.png)](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Screen-shot-2010-11-30-at-12.51.33-AM.png)

At the same time, universities in Taiwan were also beginning to develop
their own open material. The National Chiaotung University in Taiwan
joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium in April 2007, and launched their
own OpenCourseWare collection in June of the same year. Currently, they
provide 71 courses, 54 of which are recorded in real classes during the
semester (Lee Haishuo, personal communication). They also provide
discussion boards to facilitate interaction between self-learners and
online teaching assistants, to nurture a self-learning environment. This
self-learning can then lead to official certification from the
university, even for outside students, after sitting a certification
exam. Sitting the exam is free, and only requires completing an
application procedure (NCTU 2010, Lee 2010).

In 2007, a number of other universities followed the National Chiaotung
University, and joined the international OpenCourseWare Consortium. The
National Chiaotung University began outreach in early 2008, to invite
other universities to form a national association, and on the 24th of
December, Taiwan OpenCourseWare Consortium was officially formed, with
18 founding university members (TOCW 2010). However, several of these
members left because they were hoping that they would get subsidies from
the government to produce OpenCourseWare, and when they found out that
this would not happen, many left (Lee Haishuo, personal communications).

The different universities have their own specialties. For example, the
National Chiaotung University has continued developing their basic
science courses and offering them to other universities and
self-learners, Taiwan University and National Chengchi University focus
on basic education, National Taiwan Normal University offers courses on
the classics, and National Taiwan Ocean University, National Taiwan
University of Science and Technology and National Sun Yat-Sen University
have all offered courses related to their specialties (TOCW 2010).

## South Korea

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Screen-shot-2010-11-30-at-12.52.07-AM.png)](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Screen-shot-2010-11-30-at-12.52.07-AM.png)

In South Korea, the OpenCourseWare movement started with professor
Gyutae Kim, who was a professor of electrical engineering at Korea
University. He had learnt about the MIT initiative, and was eager to
start something similar in Korea. He initially proposed this to the
School of Engineering, but received little support. Later, as the
Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning in the same university,
he received the dean’s permission to pilot an OpenCourseWare project,
but without any funding (Meena Hwang, personal communication).

Gyutae Kim and his staff got strong support from MIT and the
OpenCourseWare Consortium. They participated in the OpenCourseWare
Consortium meeting in Santander, Spain, in May 2007, and learnt about an
open source platform for publishing OpenCourseWare called EduCommons.
John Dehlin, then director of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, later gave
an online presentation about the OpenCourseWare concept, which lent
important credibility to the pilot project at Korea University.

In April 2008, the Korean OpenCourseWare Consortium was formed,
consisting of five universities: Handong Global University, Inha
University, Kyung Hee University, Busan National University of Education
and Seoul National University of Technology. However, there is not
strong buy-in from presidents and staff at these universities, and
aversion by staff members to add to professors’ work burden, which has
slowed down the development of the project.

The national evaluation of universities is very important to Korean
universities, and traditionally has only looked at research, thus making
things that do not result in publications less of a priority. Recently,
there has been an increased focus on teaching and learning from the
Ministry of Education, which for example mandated centers for teaching
and learning at each university in 2006.

A large project to improve the quality of teaching that was recently
launched, called the ACE project, will disburse USD \$800,000 each year
for four years. This project, which is spearheaded by the president of
Korea OpenCourseWare Consortium, Dr. Kim Young Sup, included the
production of OpenCourseWare in the evaluation criteria for applicants,
and all ten universities that won have planned OpenCourseWare projects
in the future.

KERIS, a government subsidized organization that coordinates the
production of electronic resources for Korean Universities, has also
become involved in the opening of resources. Since 2007, it has paid
universities to create thousands of e-learning modules. Recently, it has
contacted the universities that produced these modules under contract,
and asked them to open up at least part of them to the public (Meena
Hwang, personal communications).

## A common East-Asian model

Thus in all these cases, there is an initial contact between MIT and
leading universities in the host country. Sometimes this happens through
outreach by MIT faculty or administrators, and sometimes it is
individuals who come in touch with the OpenCourseWare movement, and
decide to try to spread the idea at their university, and nationally.
Universities decide to join the OpenCourseWare Consortium individually,
and to form a national non-governmental association or federation to
coordinate the work of producing OpenCourseWare.

These organizations and efforts might receive support from the
Ministries of Education, but are not funded or organized by the national
governments. Given the way these federations began life, as
international collaborations, they remain very internationally
accessible. Websites are often available in English as well as in
national languages, researchers frequently visit international
conferences or publish in international journals, and often use the
open-source platforms for hosting OpenCourseWare that have been
developed by US universities.

---

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 the canonical PDF
  version](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses/Haklev_Stian_201009_MA_thesis.pdf)
- [Central page collecting all blog posts, many different download
  formats, and supplementary
  material](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses)

---