The Fourth CORE Lead University Meeting 2005-07-16   On July 15, representatives from Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Xi An Jiaotong University, Sichuan University, Zhejiang University, Central South University, Dalian University of Technology, and Central Radio and Television University attended the Fourth Lead University Meeting. Dr. Fun-den Wang, Chair of CORE, opened the meeting with a warm welcome. He restated CORE’s vision to escalate the quality of higher education via open sharing of educational resources and the goal of achieving 2000 world class courses translated into Chinese. To begin the first part of the meeting, representatives from LUs reported on the status of the courses that had been selected to translate. So far 43 courses have been translated and proof-read and will be handed in at the end of July to complete the first stage of translation work. 41 courses are planned to be translated and proof-read by October 31, completing the second stage of translation work. Representatives also communicated common problems and difficulties professors encountered in the course of translation. For instance, they said that some of the hand-written lecture notes were incredibly hard to recognize. In addition, the lecture notes were sometimes missing certain parts to which other parts of the lecture would refer. It is also very difficult to find professors from other universities to proof-read the translation work. After exhibiting the common obstacles that are obstructing the progress of translation, the attendees actively discussed with each other solutions to these problems. With a brief conclusion on the present translation work, the meeting was steered to the second part -- use of MIT OCW. The representative from Dalian University of Technology introduced their relatively mature system of use, which provides professors and students with facilitated access to MIT OCW. Dalian University of Technology also did regular surveys among teachers and students so the staff on MIT OCW program from their school can receive useful feedback to guide their future work. Beijing Jiaotong University highly recognized the importance of use of MIT OCW. They organized professors and experts to do comparative study between MIT OCW course materials and their own course materials. As a result, they compiled a book of 235-page preliminary report as their first stage of use of MIT OCW. The other LUs have also started to use MIT OCW course materials in various ways. During this part of the meeting, representatives also discussed how MIT OCW materials could be used in future teachings, such as in terms of syllabus development, lecture content and forms, and lab and exam design. Dr. Wang shared how the other universities around the world use MIT OCW course materials and emphasized that MIT OCW course materials could be used in many different ways. Representatives obtained valuable experiences and new ideas during the discussion which also helped to answer many of their questions about use of MIT OCW. After the meeting, representatives from both CORE and Lead Universities signed the Memorandum of Understanding on the Use of MIT OCW in CORE Lead Universities, indicating the official launch of the program of the use of MIT OCW in Lead Universities. The successful completion of the meeting marked a major milestone for the MIT OCW program in China.       close