Furthering education through open courseware in India

Abstract

With the advent of internet, the daunting task of solving the problem of imparting quality education to all has seemingly been made easy. Open Course Ware (OCW) movement pioneered by MIT allows anyone to access its course content anywhere under Creative Commons end-user license. This project looks at the possibility of launching an Open Course Ware initiative from IIM Bangalore that makes management course material available to a vast array of people. The benefits arising from OCW initiative by IIMB will be shared by faculty and students of IIMB besides outside faculty, students and institutions alike. The paper looks at various OCW initiatives across the globe and their implementation models. Mainly 4 OCW models were looked at and analyzed closely, MIT OCW, CORE Program (China), Rice University Connexions and NPTEL (India).Further, the impact of MIT OCW initiative was studied to see if the it has been worth the cause or not. The reach of MIT OCW initiative has been far reaching, achieving 8.5 million hits in OCW content in 2006. Similarly, in terms of its use, it has created a vast impact in terms of number of students, faculty and alumni accessing it across the courses. Hence, drawing analogies from MITOCW s success in USA the paper makes a case for it in India as well taking into account the perspective of students, faculty, institute and industry as well. The paper then goes on to develop a business case for IIMB s OCW initiative by looking at details like business idea, funding required (Rs 18 crore approximately), organization and leadership team required and technology platform options available. It also discusses Intellectual Property and Licensing Related issues which are an important part of OCW initiative. Finally, the paper looks at challenges in implementing the OCW initiative as it is definitely not a smooth ride, though that is not to say it is unmanageable having seen so many success stories across the globe.