About ICU OpenCourseWare
ICU celebrated the 60th anniversary of its founding in 2013. To help mark that anniversary, ICU launched its OpenCourseWare project online on 1 April 2013.
OCW is a project that makes class contents available to the public and was started at MIT in 2001. The project was then supported by universities around the globe and an OCW Consortium was established. The Japan OCW Consortium was established in 2006, with ICU joining in 2008.
When it was first started, OCW’s aim was not to offer an education, per se, but now, 20 years later, as the project’s popularity spread it has come to support the role of offering an “open education” to all people. In recent years, a project to offer education online known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has gained notice.
One of the objectives in placing course contents online is to demonstrate ICU’s liberal arts education and show the diverse forms its self-driven bilingual learning takes. At the same time, the project also aims to be a resource for ICU’s students and faculty.
At present, ICU’s OCW project has made over 170 regular courses available online (primarily through video content) plus other special lectures and classes held as demonstrations for Open Campus events. For more details on courses available, please visit the About ICU OpenCourseWare page.
At ICU, basically all courses are available to all students. We hope the course contents we make available online will be a valuable source of information for students when they are deciding what courses to take or, at the end of their second year, when they are choosing their major. Additionally, we hope that by having a short period of time when lecture videos are at first only available to individuals at ICU that OCW will be an important learning tool and help students review in ICU’s unique environment distinguished by students’ diverse language backgrounds and the university’s bilingual curriculum.
In the future, it will be possible for professors to use OCW in their classes by showing videos of special lectures or using the material from other universities’ OCW contents. It should also be possible for professors to ask students to view certain OCW contents as a preparation for an upcoming class.
Professors will also be able to improve their lectures by watching their own videos as well as get ideas and build cooperative relationships by watching other professors’ classes.
ICU’s OCW project is still very new. At present the Digital Media Support Center are focused on letting people get an initial sense about the different courses in the curriculum and uploading one or two lecture videos for each course. However, we have also started uploading all lectures for a handful of courses. There are also surely many alumni who are interested in seeing lectures by professors who were especially important to them. We plan to gradually increase the number of courses available online and hope more and more people will make use of ICU’s OCW in different ways.
We welcome any questions or feedback about ICU’s OCW project. Please contact us via the Feedback page. ICU students, educational staff and general staff can also view internal information about OCW on the ICU Portal.
Center for Teaching and Leraning