Twelve years after the Soviet economic system dissolved, management professionals and educators in Ukraine are defining a new paradigm for business.Ludmila Matiash and her colleagues at the Internet project Management: Methodology and Practice are addressing the need for resource materials on management education and organizational transformation in Ukraine.

“Universities can't respond fast enough to the needs of businesses here. Educators are redesigning their curricula but teaching methods take longer to change,” Matiash explains. “As management consultants we were experimenting with ways to improve our training and found OpenCourseWare. We were inspired by the philosophy of the approach and the strategic implications. So we began to introduce the concept of open knowledge to Ukrainian institutions."

The legacy of the Soviet university system left a void in business education. “Business management is a new phenomenon in Ukraine - a completely different mentality. This calls for new skills and new thinking,” Matiash says. “We started Management.com.ua because our business clients needed these materials. Soon we realized that the Web site is a change tool. We get to define what modern business management in Ukraine should be like.”

Management.com.ua serves as a learning community in the Ukrainian, Russian, and English languages, offering Internet forum discussions on such topics as leadership and authority, quality issues, and motivating employees, to name a few. “We think we can form interesting discussion groups around the use of OCW materials,” Matiash says. “If the process is moderated well, this would add value to different audiences.”

For example, the preparatory questions and materials from MIT OCW's Course 15.269: Literature, Ethics, and Authority are helpful training and pedagogical tools. “Business leaders here are experimenting with the guiding principles of decision-making and leadership,” Matiash says. “If we include examples from Ukrainian literature and historical experience we make the discussions relevant and more meaningful.”

Management.com.ua already offered users an Internet glossary of management and business terms in translated Ukrainian before MIT OCW, but now, with the help of MIT materials and other sources, Matiash and her colleagues are upgrading the dictionary to be more interdisciplinary. “We're adding entries which define key principles of organizational development, including concepts from [MIT faculty] Peter Senge and Stephen Covey,” she explains.

Matiash and her colleagues are also utilizing Course 24.00: Problems in Philosophy to introduce new issues in business contexts. “We believe that interdisciplinary resources will contribute to the set of tools which managers need to make wise decisions,” she says. “Businesses here are developing and adapting faster than other institutions. The real education in business management is happening at the company level. Businesses here have to be very agile because change everywhere else is out of control.”

Born in the United States after her parents emigrated from Ukraine, Matiash first went to Ukraine in 1992 with the Peace Corps. She later worked for the World Bank and has been served with Management.com.ua in Kyiv for six years.

“We looked at Course 6.001: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and Course 6.170: Laboratory in Software Engineering because they are very comprehensive. The course descriptions and syllabi can be used by educators and trainers to model their own courses… We believe that OCW can inspire creative thinking in educators, business leaders and management consultants,” she shares.

Ludmila Matiash
Management consultant and editor with the Internet project “Management: Methodology and Practice”
Kyiv, Ukraine

Costa Rica, Honduras, Venezuela, Taiwan, The Netherlands, several other countries in the European Union - Marlon Yong Chacon has studied and/or attended educational conferences in a variety of different countries.

Now a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Costa Rica in San Jose, Chacon understands the value of casting a wide net when trying to capture the latest ideas in teaching and research. So he sees tremendous value in free and open Web access to the course materials of MIT's faculty. Just don't ask him to name the one MIT OCW course he values the most.

“I have been beneficiary of reading the sites of the courses (graduate and undergraduate) Game Theory, Industrial Organization, Finance, Risk Management, Mathematics for Economist, Finance, Market Design, Econometrics, Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Theory, along with topics concerning Regulation, Privatization, Market Microstructure, Electricity Markets, Economic Theory and so on,” he says, “most all of the courses at the MIT Department of Economics.”

As Chacon has read through the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets, and exams of MIT courses over the course of the last year, he has been very careful to send along his suggestions on how MIT OCW can be improved. “Course 14.271 is an excellent Industrial Organization course, and it is very illustrative about current research in IO,” Chacon emailed in May. “However, I would suggest that it is necessary to link with Finance, specifically Market Microstructure, in order to link IO to Finance.”

Chacon hopes one day to bring faculty from MIT's Department of Economics to Costa Rica for a professional visit, but for now, access to MIT's course materials are a welcome tool for him, his colleagues, and his students. “Your initiative will improve the common knowledge, and the way we can try to understand the economy and be up-to-date with theoretical, practical and empirical advances in the science,” he says.

Marlon Yong Chacon
Professor in the Department of Economics, University of Costa Rica
San Jose, Costa Rica

In reading the stories of real people who are benefiting from MIT OpenCourseWare, we hope that other colleges and universities around the world are inspired to openly share their knowledge and educational materials. The hope is that educators around the world will be able to utilize the course materials presented on the MIT OCW Web site for curriculum development, and learners will be able to draw upon the materials for self-study or supplementary use. If you would like to share your story with us for the purposes of developing user profiles, please contact Jon Paul Potts, the MIT OCW Communications Manager, at jpotts@mit.edu.

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