How Well Are Current OCW Offerings Meeting Users' Expectation?: A Study from Presentation Format and Delivery Mode Perspective

Lei Jin, Weikai Xie, and Ruimin Shen

Keywords

Open courseware, OCW, open educational resources, OER, online lecture

Abstract

While Open Courseware (OCW) initiatives have been widely adopted by universities, little attention has been paid to whether the presentation formats and delivery modes of current OCW offerings are satisfying from end users’ perspectives. To address this issue, we executed two surveys, the first one covering technical aspects of OCWs, such as presentation formats, delivery mode, and the second one inquiring about the users’ perspective. From the technical survey, we find that while current OCWs use different kind of presentation formats such as text, screencast video, all of them are delivered in asynchronous mode in which learners can only access courseware produced in advance. The second survey indicates that richness of the media and availability of live access in OCW are among the users’ top concerns. Based on these results, we propose an optimized presentation format and a live open course model to further improve the users’ satisfaction of OCW.

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