Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities Are Opening Up Access to Their Courses
2011; Society for College and University Planning; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0736-0983
Autores Tópico(s)Global Education Systems and Policies
ResumoUnlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities Are Opening Up Access to Their Courses by Taylor Walsh Princeton University Press 2011 320 pages ISBN 978-0-691-14874 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At the turn of the century, most of us watched as top universities began to experiment with as a means to reach out to existing as well as new constituencies of learners. Now over a decade later and faced with unprecedented economic challenges, many a university and college is looking to as a means to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Moreover, all sectors of education are being transformed by changes in the way knowledge is created and disseminated. Witness the massive increase in iTunesU videos throughout education, or Google higher education courseware and skim the over 500,000 search results. Clearly, the gates have been unlocked. Taylor Walsh, writing on behalf of Ithaka S+R, a not-for-profit strategy and research service that supports innovation in the academic community (www.ithaka.org/), has chronicled the development of key in this space. Her compilation of two years of research, including an impressive list of over 80 in-depth interviews, has resulted in a scholarly monograph that provides senior academic leadership with actionable, strategic intelligence around activity in this evolving field. Considering the confusion regarding the definition of courseware, Walsh states that the term online courseware as used throughout the book refers to initiatives in which traditional degree-granting institutions convert course materials, originally designed for their own undergraduates, into non-credit-bearing versions for the general public (p. 1). Walsh provides seven case studies of leading initiatives: two now-defunct initiatives, Fathom and AllLearn; four free and open projects, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) OpenCourseWare, Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, Open Yale Courses, and webcast.berkeley; and, for an international perspective that differs in a number of respects from the others, the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning by the Indian Institutes of Technology. As part of each case study, Walsh provides a description of the initiative's beginning; unique objectives; business model; offerings; relationship with its host institution(s), funder(s), and/or partner(s); effort at self-evaluation; and plans for long-term sustainability. The monograph opens with an outstanding foreword by William G. Bowen, president emeritus, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Princeton University. An introductory chapter then sets the context in which Walsh states that the book's primary intention is to analyze elite universities' uses of the internet to publish core undergraduate course materials, in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes (p. 19). A concluding chapter highlights key findings, and an epilogue explores the potential effects of the expanding set of experiments currently underway and being designed at nearly every institution in the United States and abroad. Beginning with the case studies of the brief histories of Fathom, a Columbia University-led for-profit endeavor, and AllLearn, an effort brought together through a consortium of Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale Universities, Walsh outlines the challenges faced by revenue-generating initiatives. I read with great interest as I, along with authors Linda Baer and Doreen Starke-Meyerring, had studied Fathom's innovative partnership back in 2001. At that time, we wrote: No one institution has enough human, intellectual, and fiscal infrastructure to meet the complex needs and services that exist in an e-environment (Duin, Baer, and Starke-Meyerring 2001, p. …
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