 From September 26 to September 29, more than 200 representatives from American, European and Asian attended the OCW Consortium Meeting and Open Education Conference: 2006 in Utah State University. Under the Support of Hewlett Foundation, Open Education, leading by MIT, is developing in an unbelievable speed in resent years. More and more people are involving in this movement. They are international educators committing themselves to human civilization by promoting intellect resources sharing and human equalization. This educational revolution had great influence to the whole world and received high respects from every social class.
OCW Consortium Meeting in September 26 is a work meeting of consortium members, designing to discuss and research OCW, to communicate problems encountered in making OCW£¬and to guide and plan this movement.
Goals of the OCW Consortium are to extend the reach and impact of opencourseware by encouraging the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials around the world, to foster the development of additional opencourseware projects and to ensure the long-term sustainability of opencourseware projects by identifying ways to improve effectiveness and reduce costs. This consortium is a collaboration of 107 higher education institutions and 49 associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. In addition, there are another 44 higher education institutions and associated organizations preparing to join in this consortium.
To be different from the previous ones, this consortium had 13 concurrent sessions in different assembly rooms according to the content,, and each one had a chair. Cathy Casserly, from Hewlett Foundation, Anne Margulies and Steven Carson, from MIT, attended this conference as chairs. And topics had concerned during those sessions includ regional consortium of universities; OCW and national education policy; sustainability of OCW; how to dealing with the third party content in open publication; further development of OCW; technique support and update of myOCW, and problems of constructing OCW publication platforms. After the speeches, participants actively discussed those topics.
Open Education Conference is an annual conference which held in Utah State University. The keynote of this conference is community, culture, content, and technologies for exploring open educational resources. During the 3-day conference, most of topics were set in tools and software using in open education, application of open educational resources, and integration and exploration of present resources. There had two leading addresses every morning, and then different speeches in concurrent sessions. Totally, there are more than 40 topic speeches during the whole conference. Participants chose different sessions according to their own interests, but the whole conference was in perfect order at all times
.
Prof. Fun-Den Wang, Chairman of CORE, led a Chinese delegation attended this conference. This delegation included Prof. Huang Meiqi, Chairman Assistant of CORE, Prof. Chen Jiangang, from Tsinghua University, and Prof. Fang Jin, from Beijing Normal University. On behalf of CORE, Prof. Fun-Den Wang gave a speech on the conference. He introduced resent developments and activities of CORE. Some representatives, especially new members, showed great interests in CORE. They asked a lot of question about CORE, and Prof. Fun-den Wang replied them respectively. It deserves to point out that CORE representatives are among the most active ones in this conference. They attended different sessions, and listened carefully. At the same time, they communicated with other participants and looked for opportunities of cooperation.
 At the end of this conference, participants from CORE praised highly of this conference. It was meaningful and fruitful, and it answered for what they had expected: enhancing the agglomeration of CORE and speeding international communication and cooperation. It was commonly agreed that gains from this conference are good for advancing and promoting open education in China.
|
