• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
 
User experiences with Open Course Ware
[Skip 3 lines, then Author(s) name(s) in bold letters 11pt and centred]
E. Sjoer, TA Hennis
[Skip 1 line, then author(s) affiliations(s) in normal letters 11pt and left aligned]
Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Jaffalaan 5,2628 BX Delft, The Netherlands (E.Sjoer@tudelft.nl)
[Skip 3 lines, then “Abstract” in bold letters 10pt and left aligned]
Abstract
[bold letters 10pt and left aligned]In October 2007, TU Delft (Netherlands) launched its Open Course Ware website (http://ocw.tudelft.nl) and became a member of the world-wide OpenCourseWare consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org). Fromthis date, educational resources used for the MSc programmes in Civil engineering, Electrical engineeringand Offshore engineering have been made available to the public. The goal of the OpenCourseWareinitiative is to attract new students and increase collaboration with society. Since the TU DelftOpenCourseWare website is its pilot phase, it needed to be evaluated. Upcoming courses on sustainabledevelopment, applied physics and biomedical engineering should benefit from the evaluation results. In this paper, user statistics on unique visitors, geographic origination, frequently visited areas, downloadsetcetera, will be presented. Furthermore, focus groups were organized with bachelor and master studentsand bachelor-level-teachers. How do potential new students experience TU Delft OpenCourseWare? Whois accessing the OpenCourseWare website for what reason? Does it fit workplace learning and does it inviteusers to self study?
[Skip 2 lines, then “Keywords” in italic letters, 10pt, aligned with abstract, up to 5 relevant keywords]
 Keywords:
educational resources, open course ware, accessibility
[Skip 2 lines, then the main body of the paper]
1. INTRODUCTION
 
[Heading 1, bold letters CAPS 11pt, left aligned and numbered][Skip 1 line between headings and between headings and the following text]
In October 2007, Delft University of Technology launched its Open Course Warewebsite. TU Delft OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of educationalmaterials, organized as courses. The
 
goal of the OpenCourseWare initiative is to attractnew students and increase collaboration with society, as it is formulated on the website,‘to eliminate borders and geographic distance as obstacles to the instantaneous exchangeof knowledge and new ideas. […] Educators from around the world may upgrade their classes; students may enhance their coursework or pursue self study; the general publicmay glimpse the depth and breadth of what leading universities are offering and benefitfrom reading lists and lectures.’ The rector magnificus Jacob Fokkema stated:
‘ 
TU Delftis dedicated to finding sustainable solutions for social problems. The university’s coretasks include delivering know-how and building knowledge networks in an internationalcontext.’ The first courses that were open to the public were the MSc programmes inWatermanagement (Civil Engineering), Micro-electronics (Electrical Engineering) andOffshore Engineering.This paper will address the process before launch shortly, and will mainly focus on the preliminary results gathered from user statistics and focus groups with potential newstudents and their teachers (bachelor students and bachelor-level-teachers). The research
 
question can be formulated as follows:
What are the preliminary findings of TU Delft OpenCourseWare in terms of access, and perception of the educational resources by potential new students and their teachers?
In the conclusion lessons learned can bederived from this case study for other (technical) universities that consider Open CourseWare.
2. STARTING AN OPEN COURSE WARE PROJECT
In June 2006, a project on OpenCourseWare started, initiated by a group of people:rector magnificus, a professor specialized in e-learning, people from the library, and thetechnical support department. The budget allocated was K€ 600. The idea was to designan Open Course Ware website, à la MIT, and pilot with six master courses in twosuccessive rounds. Work packages were defined, implying tooling up the technicalinfrastructure, defining the work processes for delivery of educational material, andsetting up communication and evaluation strategies. Furthermore, a work package‘Strategy’ was put into place, researching the sustainability of the project on the longer term.In October 2007, the website went ‘live’ with ten courses of three master programmes:Watermanagement (Civil Engineering), Micro-electronics (Electrical Engineering) andOffshore Engineering. Teachers of these courses volunteered to put the material of their courses online. They got K€ 50 for each programme to digitalize and update some of theeducational material that was meant originally for face-to-face delivery. Furthermore,copyrights need to be arranged and the material should be added to the supportededucational database. In the meantime a lot of knowledge was gained on copyrights – TUDelft decided on a creative comments license… A small ‘bureau’ was put into place toscreen the material submitted by the teachers on copyrights. A technical infrastructurewas set up and finally, the look and feel of the website was designed with new icons for educational resources. Figure 1 shows a screen dump of the website as it is now.Figure 1: Screendump of the website (February 2008)For the evaluation of the first pilot phase, a number of instruments were designed(Evaluatieplan 2007). Log facilities were installed to measure the exposure of and accessto the Delft OpenCourseWare website. A short survey was designed to determine the useof educational material and the attractiveness of the website. Unfortunately until now theresponse rate was low. Moreover, to gain insight into the quality of the educationalmaterial, focus groups were organized. For this paper the results of the focus groups with potential new students were revealed.
3. FINDINGS: ACCESS
Access to Delft OpenCourseWare is tracked via Google Analytics. Log data are acquiredof characteristics of visits and visitors.
 
3.1 Visits characteristics
From October 15 2007 – February 22 2008 (19 weeks) the website attracted 12.729visitors (10.472 are unique visitors with different IP-adresses). That is nearly 100 visitorsa day on average. 82% of them were first time visitors. As figure X shows, there is asmall peak on 28 November 2007 when the number of visitors nearly doubled. Probablydue to an article …[aan Willem vragen]Figure x: Number of visits77% of the visitors entered the Delft OpenCourseWare website via reference fromanother site, mostly from tudelft.nl or ocw.consortium.org and only 9 % came fromsearch engines: nearly all via Google. Search terms that are most frequently used, are:Open Course Ware and OpenCourseWare. 63 % of the visitors are users of InternetExplorer/Windows (84% XP and 8% Vista). On average the visits are short.Since there was a so called soft launch with not much publicity there was no visitor’s peak at the beginning of the Open Course Ware. Some of the peaks that occurred, might be explained by an article that mentioned Delft OpenCourseWare. It seems to be preferable for the number of visits to be referenced by another site. Finally, Open CourseWare is a well known term for open access to digital educational resources, althoughsome people do have problems with the term ‘course’.
3.2 Visitors characteristics
Who are the visitors of the Delft OpenCourseWare website? We don’t have much data onthe visitor’s characteristics. From the log data the residence is known (see figure x):Figure x: Visitors per countryThe Netherlands is responsible for half of the traffic, which is not surprising. However, asfigure X depicts, there are 140 other countries involved, originating from 2400 cities. The potential exposure of educational material geographically could be significant.
4. FINDINGS: PERCEPTION
Last year Bachelor students of schools of higher education (HBO) are potential newstudents for the Master programmes of Delft University of Technology. TheOpenCourseWare website provides students and teachers the opportunity to get anoverview of the educational programme, the level required, and other relevant, domain-related issues. The extent to which the website succeeds in doing this is investigated bydoing focus group interviews with the both Bachelor and Master students.
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...