#323 Poster

Monday 16 April 15:00 - 17:15 Bar/Conservatory

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow on OCW in Japan

Yoshimi Fukuhara, JOCW, Japan

Conference Theme: Impact

Summary: Seven years have passed since the first OCW in Japan. We have had many trials and experiences so far and have a perspective.

Abstract: JOCW was established with six universities in 2005 as a closed forum and in 2006 JOCW has been changed to an open organization for mainly universities who wanted to launch OCW with nine universities and one national organization. In 2007 we enlarged its membership to private sectors and introduced annual fee system in order to ensure financial structure. Now total JOCW members are forty-three organizations, which are twenty-four universities, three NPOs and sixteen companies respectively. Total OCW courses distributed from Japan were totally 153 courses at the beginning, 96 courses in Japanese and 57 courses in English respectively, and it became totally 1798 courses, 1523 courses in Japanese and 275 courses in English on November 2011.
According to the increase of total OCW courses, it is expected that more courses can be matched with the user’s needs. Actually monthly-visitors to the each university’s OCW site was about sixty thousand per month at the beginning except abnormal big number caused by the media exposure, but it became five hundred thousands per month on November 2011.
We have carried out the public opinion poll concerning Opening up of university lectures annually since first one in 2006. The survey was conducted as a form of Internet research, which was taken for twelve hundred examinees on the Internet to distribute questionnaire consist of thirty-seven questions. The summary of the survey results of recent two years is as below:

1. Through 5 year-polls more than 90% of respondents gave positive evaluation on opening up of lectures in universities.
2. Awareness of OCW is relatively low, only 30% of respondents knew opening up activities of some universities but the rate is gradually increasing.
3. Persons who have accessed OCW site of some university are only 5% but 60% answered that they would like to access those sites in future.
4. In 2009 most popular type of lecture information was syllabi and lecture notes but in 2010 more people selected lecture videos.
5. Top five popular disciplines for OCW are Information science, Engineering, Literature, Sociology and Economics in 2011.

The results of this poll show the huge potential and expectations of OCW and we believe OCW could be the social infrastructure for life-long education. In order to realize it we have to make more promotions to the government and universities not joined and the public for practical use of OCW.
JOCW have had bi-annual meeting since 2006 and have jointly organized Asian OCW and Open Education conference since 2009, in Seoul 2009, in Taipei 2010 and in Tokyo 2011. Through these activities we could share know-how and experiences each other and recently we started some joint projects in terms of advanced usage of OCW.
In this report we will explain the current situation and future plan on an example of the joint project among Asian countries.