Open Courseware Developments in Turkey

In this talk, the benefits of open courseware are reviewed and the establishment and the activities of the national consortium (UADMK) are communicated. The current status of the project received from the State Planning Organization (DPT) is discussed in detail.

Open Courseware (OCW) or more generally Open Educational Resources (OER) is an initiative to provide educational course material at the undergraduate and graduate levels (and even at secondary education) online, free and openly available to humanity. This initiative is mainly attributed to MIT. OCW promotes cooperation, sharing and learning among instructors and provides a free advertising platform for educational institutions. In addition, it creates a competitive atmosphere among the instructors and content developers. Hence, quality of OCW can be improved. OCW can be an efficient way of promoting lifelong learning. Governments may reduce the overall cost of higher education by supporting OCW projects and hence gain publicity.

With a similar set of objectives as mentioned above, a National Open Courseware consortium (UADMK) with more than 50 universities was established in 2007 under the leadership of Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) with the support of Higher Education Council and Turkish Academic Network and Information Center (ULAKB?M) of TÜB?TAK (http://www.acikders.org.tr) working group in order to initiate a project to be submitted to DPT of Turkey. The project acquired about 2 million TL’s for the design and translation of open courseware material in Turkish. The project aims at having more than two-hundred such courseware in Turkish language by the end of 2011. Currently, the consortium is at the stage of evaluating the applications made for translations from the MIT Open Courseware courses in the areas of basic sciences and earth sciences.

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