The free and open publication of course materials (OpenCourseWare or OCW) was initially undertaken by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other universities primarily to share educational resources among educators (Abelson, 2007). OCW, however, and more in general open educational resources (OER), have also provided well-documented opportunities for all learners, including the so-called “informal learners” and “independent learners” (Carson, 2005; Mulder, 2006, p. 35). Universities have also increasingly documented clear benefits for specific target groups such as secondary education students and lifelong learners seeking to enter formal postsecondary education programs. <br /><br />In addition to benefitting learners, OCW publication has benefitted the publishing institutions themselves by providing recruiting advantages. Finally enrollment figures from some institutions indicate that even in the case of the free and open publication of materials from online programs, OCW does not negatively affect enrollment. This paper reviews evaluation conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), and Open Universiteit Nederland (OUNL) concerning OCW effects on higher education participation and student recruitment.
Informatics is a relatively new discipline, nowadays of key importance in all economic processes. Many professionals are needed with different informatics backgrounds. The Informatics Curriculum Framework 2000 (ICF-2000) has been designed to cope with a large diversity in demands for informatics education in a controlled way. It offers 8 different curriculum specifications that fit 8 professional role categories. It supports systematic and controlled educational policies in which educational informatics programmes can be developed in a cost-effective way, if need be from scratch. Learning materials can be developed in the local cultural tradition. ICF-2000 has many source links to model informatics curricula from leading professional informatics societies. Through this mechanism ICF-2000 can be easily kept up to date.
Various recognized international professional organizations have recently developed university curricula concepts and models for the broad field which is referred to as computing, informatics or l(C)T (= Information and Communication Technology). The outcomes show a significant diversity, a little maybe because of the difference in terminology but much more so because of a variation in views and approaches. If one expects a strongly grown maturity of the field paralleled by paradigmatic convergence, after so many decades of development, this is a surprising result. In order to gain more insight in this matter this paper presents an assessment exercise for three such curriculum schemes. They are compared on a series of characteristic features as well as judged against a set of general guiding principles. The assessed schemes are ICF-2000 (by IFIP in commission of UNESCO), CC2001 (by ACM and IEEE-CS) and Career Space (by a European consortium of ICT industry in partnership with the European Commission).
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