OpenCourseWare

Open Educational Resources and Open Access in Higher Education in Macedonia

by Dimitar Poposki

Written as a research for the Metamorphosis NGO from Macedonia. Non peer-reviewed, any comments or suggestions are more than welcomed! This paper might be used as a starting point for my PhD thesis, if anyone is interested in cooperating in the area of Open Access or Open Educational Resources contact me in person via e-mail or FB, Twitter.

Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER) represent the core values of the free sharing of knowledge. By... more Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER) represent the core values of the free sharing of knowledge. By following their beginnings, understanding their concepts, the ways in which they are used by the society can assist the build of knowledge-based economies of South Eastern European countries like Republic of Macedonia.
The need for shifting toward the openness of scholarly communication and the construct of information
infrastructure in the higher education requests the use of more flexible copyright licenses used for the academic publishing of textbooks and e-journals in order to provide the society with valuable knowledge. By using EU recommendations from the OA and OER best practices
projects, the higher education institutions in RM can improve their role as leading figures in production of knowledge and develop the economy of the country. In order to do so, new
models of OA and OER should be explored and implemented at the national level supported by the information literacy initiatives as a part of lifelong learning scheme.

Poster OCW-UNIA (Jornadas de Innovación Docente, Córdoba, 2009)

by maria Sánchez

The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching

by Stian Haklev

MA thesis, Dept of Theory and Policy Studies, University of Toronto

The Top Level Quality Project (jingpin kecheng, 精品课程) is a large project in Chinese higher education which uses the... more The Top Level Quality Project (jingpin kecheng, 精品课程) is a large project in Chinese higher education which uses the production of Open Educational Resources to improve the quality of undergraduate education.

Widely understood in the West to be a form of OpenCourseWare inspired by MIT’s example, this thesis traces the roots of the project back to the history of Russian influence on Chinese higher education, the introduction of course evaluation systems in 1985, a string of large-scale funding projects to promote excellence in the 1990’s, and the massification of higher education from 1988 to 1998.

After a detailed description of the project, the thesis suggests that university teaching is conceptualized very differently in North America and in China, drawing parallels both to the historical French and German models of the university, and to the Chinese tradition of using “models” to promote virtue and excellence.