17th November 2022 is World Access to Higher Education Day, and to celebrate it, the Free Curricula Centre at New World University is delighted to announce our new OpenCourseWare initiative!
First popularised by MIT twenty years, an OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative is one way that an educational institution can makes its curricular materials openly available for individuals to use to learn independently, or for other institutions to use when revising their own programmes. Open Education Global has defined an OCW project as having three parts:
- Firstly, at its core, it consists of free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organised as courses. Our initiative allows anyone to download our materials. While at present the format available is platform specific, our goal going forward is to to broaden the options available in this regard.
- Secondly, these materials are available for use and adaptation under an open license, such as certain Creative Commons licenses. In our case we are releasing our courses under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, version 3.0. While this is a more restrictive license than we might otherwise select, this choice stems in part from many of our materials themselves having been adapted from previous open educational resources that were publicly released under that same license, obligating us to follow suit.
- Finally, an OCW project does not typically provide certification or access to faculty. The same is true for ours, and those who are interested in taking our courses are welcome simply to enrol as students to have access to the same materials in a format more conducive to individual study.
We’re grateful for this opportunity to give back to the open education community and hope that other educators will find this initiative useful. And as always, we welcome feedback from any interested party at info@newworld.ac.