Abstract This thesis describes the Top Level Quality Project (jingpin kecheng, 精品课程), a large project in Chinese higher education which uses the production of Open Educational Resources to improve the quality of undergraduate education. The thesis first introduces the concept of Open Educational Resources, and the frameworks of world institutionalism, and policy borrowing. It then gives the historical background from the project, before it describes the project in detail, using interviews and secondary m... Acknowledgement Although I had always been interested in open movements, I began to learn about Open Educational Resources first at the iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik in 2007, whose education section was very ably facilitated by Allen Gunn. Later, in fall 2007, I attended the incredible open course “Intro to Open Education”, taught by David Wiley, then at Utah State University. Through this course, I first began reading about how MIT courses had been translated to Chinese and were used in Chinese classrooms. On t... 1. Introduction Intro The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching Introduction In 2003, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched its OpenCourseWare website, which eventually came to contain online resources for virtually every course taught at the institution. This received much media attention, and gradually a number of other institutions joined in by publishing their own courses. In 2005, the OpenCourseWare Consortium was... Objectives purposes Objectives Without understanding properly how the National Top Level Courses Project is organized, it will be very difficult for foreign organizations to engage and collaborate with Chinese institutions. In scope, this is by a wide margin the largest Open Educational Resources project in the world, and much could be learnt from the Chinese experience. It also presents a very fascinating platform for different kinds of research on the production, use and reuse of Open Educational Resources. Howev... Organization of thesis Organization of the thesis I will begin by a literature review in chapter two, which will focus on two main topics. First, I will review some of the literature on Open Educational Resources, including the definition and a brief history of the term. I will also introduce some different types of Open Educational Resources from around the world, and a typology of Open Educational Resources projects, based on the purposes they aim to achieve. Then an introduction to the literature surrounding intern... Research questions Research questions The first question I asked was “what is this program”. I wanted to understand all the details around how the program was organized, how courses are created and by whom, how the program is financed, and who uses the resources. The program began in 2003, so I also wanted to look at how it has changed through this time period. I then wanted to understand how it came to be launched at exactly that time in history, looking at the history of Chinese higher education for clues of tre... 2. Literature review Borrowing and lending World institutionalism and policy borrowing At the 2008 Open CourseWare Consortium conference in Dalian, China, representatives from universities in many different countries were gathered to report on the progress, and share their experiences with opening up access to their course materials. Chinese researchers shared statistics on how large a percentage of students were aware of OpenCourseWare, Japanese professors showcased their latest OpenCourseWare semantic search tool, and Mexican researche... Intro Literature review Introduction In this chapter, I will first introduce the concept of Open Educational Resources, define the concept, and discuss the history of MIT OpenCourseWare. I will then develop a typology of Open Educational Resources based on their purpose, which will be used in chapter six to compare MIT OpenCourseWare with China’s Top-Level Courses Project. The final part of the literature review will introduce the concept of world institutionalism and a critique of the view that educa... Open Educational Resources OER Open Educational Resources and MIT’s OpenCourseWare Outside of China, the Top-Level Courses have been widely understood to represent a form of Open Educational Resources, and in chapter six we will compare this project to the MIT OpenCourseWare project. To be able to do this, it is necessary to understand more about the definition and history of the concept of Open Educational Resources. In this section, I will also introduce a proposed typology for Open Educational Resources, based around their... Typology Typology of Open Educational Resources based on their purpose There are many models for developing Open Educational Resources, and this is partly because the goals of the various projects are different. To make this clearer, I propose a typology of Open Educational Resources based on their purpose. When people develop Open Educational Resources, they make many decisions around format, scope, organization, licensing and so on, and these are informed by the purpose the resource is to fulfill, as w... 3. Methodology Formal interviews Formal interviews I spent three months in the summer of 2009, and another four months from December 2009 to March 2010 in China, collecting data for my thesis. I had originally planned to visit three universities, but due to time constraints and problems with securing institutional permission, I ended up visiting two institutions. My ethics proposal was only approved days before the summer vacation, so I was not able to conduct any of my formal interviews during the summer. When I came back in... Informal interactions Informal interactions During my total of seven months in China, I had a number of opportunities to learn more about the Top-Level Courses Project through informal interactions with colleagues. A year prior to beginning my research, I attended a large Open Educational Resources conference in Dalian, co-hosted by China Open Resources for Education and the international OpenCourseWare Consortium. The contacts I made there were very useful to me in my later work. I later visited with professors and ... Introduction Methodology Introduction Given that very little was known about the Top-Level Courses Project outside of China when I began my research, my research has been mainly exploratory. Rather than defining my research questions early on, and testing very rigorous hypotheses, I have had to pursue the topic through a number of channels until I reached a better understanding of what I was researching. Indeed, I began with very different ideas about how the Top-Level Courses Project functioned, and how it ... Secondary lit and courses Secondary literature and online resources There has been very little written about the Top-Level Courses Project in English. Usually, it is only mentioned as part of an article about OpenCourseWare or Open Educational Resources as an example of a large-scale project, but little is conveyed about the actual design, functioning, and purpose of the project (and indeed much that is conveyed is misleading, as we shall see in chapter six). In Chinese, however, there has been a large number of academic... 4. History 1949- 958 and 211 Massification of higher education, and prestige projects In 1993, the Ministry of Education released the Outline for Reform and Development of Education, which put a focus on building up approximately 100 key universities and a number of key disciplines. Project 211, which was mentioned in this plan, was launched through the project “Reform Plan of Teaching Contents and Curriculum of Higher Education Facing the 21st Century” in 2004, which ratified the establishment of 211 big projects and nearl... Continuity and change after cultural revolution Continuity and Change after the Cultural Revolution Pepper (1990, 131) says: "In all other respects, the university system that was reestablished between 1977 and 1980 essentially replicated the antebellum model of the 1960s, which was essentially the same as the Sino-Soviet compromise variation that had emerged from the early 1950s pro-Soviet period. Hence, all of that system's centralized features abolished during the 1966-76 decade were restored. These included the national unified college en... Course evaluations - beginnings The beginning of course evaluations Around the same time that the universities gained more freedom over their curriculum and teaching, efforts began to measure and improve the quality of courses. The Shanghai Higher Educational Bureau began experimenting with evaluation in 1983, to raise the quality of teaching, strengthen the teaching of basic courses, and improve the training of practical ability. At all 45 institutions of higher education in Shanghai, courses on the history of the Chinese rev... Course reform newer Course evaluation and quality assurance Since the beginning of formal course evaluations in 1985 with the appraisal of engineering education, systems of quality assurance developed rapidly. Evaluation and recognition of excellence among courses were used to foster competition and reform of curriculum and teaching approaches (HEEC 2010). One of the two universities I visited during my research, was a Normal University (University B). The academic affairs officer there explained to me how their c... Discussion Discussion This chapter has summarized developments in Chinese higher education during the last 60 years, to show the factors enabling the Top-Level Courses Project. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet system of higher education is imported whole-sale through Russian experts, and translation. From 1950 to 1976, there is a constant struggle between the extreme left, and the moderate factions, leading to excesses like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution....