Open Learning Network

Initiating an OpenCourseWare project at an institution or nation requires carefully planning of resources and vision. “It starts with a conversation and progresses to garnering faculty and administrative support, and locating resources to sustain the project” (Henson, p.1, 2005). Therefore learning from current projects, gaining know-how from these projects is utmost importance. In this sense, this research project will develop a model for universities who have an OCW project or who want to start one. It will show possible difficulties they can face and show worked strategies which can help to solve their problems. This model will be a representation of major components of an OCW initiative and detailed description of these components.

In this model, researcher will try to find evidence about working strategies from current projects and try to understand process they go through, difficulties they face, strategies they follow. To do this, besides a comprehensive literature review,  four major OER projects (MIT OpenCourseWare, Rice University’s Connexions, UK Open University’s OpenLearn, and Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative) will be investigated in terms of their production model, sustainability strategies and quality assurance. The rationale behind this selection is that they are successful and most importantly they each appear to have their own distinctive OER development model that differentiates them from other OER initiatives. After that five OCW initiatives in Turkey will be investigated and finally in the light of gathered evidence "OCW initiative model" will be developed.

P.S: This project will be built on an ongoing survey study conducted in 47 universities in Turkey as a part of PhD. project. The survey study investigates lecturers' perspectives on freely publishing their course materials for everybody to use.  More specifically researcher tries to understand perceived barriers and enablers for lecturers to share their course materials and perceived value of freely publishing their course material.