The Inside Higher Ed newsletter describes the new Utah OCW Alliance in these words, "The participating universities include six public institutions--the College of Eastern Utah; Dixie State and Utah Valley State Colleges; the University of Utah; and Utah State and Weber State Universities--as well as Western Governors University, an online institution founded by 19 governors. A number of university extension courses covering gardening and farming topics are represented online--including cattle management, food safety, soils and landscapes, annuals and perennials, turf management, irrigation and fertilization. Other areas strongly represented on the site include engineering, liberal arts and instructional technology."
The Alliance states its purpose this way, "We hope you find the courses from each university valuable whether you're a student looking for some extra help, a faculty member trying to prepare a new course, or just interested in learning more a bout a topic that interests you."
Use the Courses link to see what is offered. Both pdf and zip files are available for download. Unfortunately, in the courses that I examined, what is actually available are mostly course outlines rather than the full contents of the courses: lecture and reading materials are not made available; most of the courses are textbook dependent and the texts must be purchased separately. An adult learner would have great difficulty using these course materials for self-study; even students who examined the materials to supplement their courses from other institutions would find the offerings of little value.
As a former director of a university teaching and learning center I know how difficult it is to persuade instructors to use online course materials from other institutions, let alone make their own courses available for open viewing by other instructors and by un-enrolled students. The OCW movement has made great advances in changing academic attitudes about the desirability of sharing online instructional resources. The next major step will be to improve the content of those shared resources (to include audio/video lectures, quizzes, problem sets, and online textbooks).
The Alliance has made a start toward providing open educational resources, but this promising beginning will only be fully realized if the course materials are greatly enhanced. This is a problem at many OCW sites. There is wide variability in the quality and sufficiency of OCW materials at different institutions, including the original site at MIT. The OCW movement as a whole needs to ask and answer these questions, "Are we providing sufficient content in our OCW courses for students who want to study on their own?" "Are these simply previews of courses or complete, self-sufficient courses? "Could an instructor at another institution find sufficient content to use to supplement his/her own course?" If the answers are "No," "Previews," and "No"--then OCW materials should be listed as syllabi collections rather than courseware collections. ____JH
7:48:17 AM 
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