Chinese National Top Level Courses Project
Using Open Educational Resources to Promote
Quality in Undergraduate Teaching
MA Thesis
by Stian H?klev, University of Toronto, September 2010.Creative Commons BY 3.0. Other
formats, and supplementary materials available at http://reganmian.net/top-level-coursesChapter 1: Introduction
In
2003, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched its OpenCourseWare website, which eventually came to contain online resources for virtually every course taught at the institution. This received much media attention, and gradually a number of other institutions joined in by publishing their own courses. In 2005, the OpenCourseWare Consortium was formed, and it became independent in 2007. The consortium members from 24 different countries use similar software and organizing principles for their materials. If you look at a course in Japan, or in Saudi Arabia, you are likely to find the same elements: a course outline, a reading list, lecture slides and in some cases lecture recordings, and sometimes sample exams, or samples of student work.If
you visit Dr. Li Xuejun's course on pharmacology at the website of Peking University, you will find the structure very familiar. There is an introduction to the course, a list of the members of the teaching team, reading lists, lecture slides, lecture recordings and even some exam questions. This course is one of more than 12,000 open courses that have been developed by faculty from more than 700 Chinese universities, as a part of the Chinese Ministry of Education's National Top Level Courses Project, which started in 2003. Despite the large scale of this project, very little is known about it outside of China. Most of the English-language sources that mention it, assume naturally that it is another OpenCourseWare