The idea of open course, giving away a free access to university lectures, is very simple. Every coursework materials are online and made available to, in principle, everyone, and most importantly, without any fee. The free online lectures have, so far, attracted 125 million visitors for 2,150 courses, according to the OpenCourseWare (OCW) statistics. OCW has been initiated in Europe by the University of Tubingen in Germany in 1999, where they first published video lectures online. Later, it has been popularized when MIT launched OCW in 2002. Since then, prestigious universities like Yale and University of California at Berkeley joined the movement, followed by numerous universities all over the world. Now, the OCW consortium is formed worldwide and expected to broaden its existence as an access to the higher education for everyone.
Korea Open Courseware (KOCW) started to provide a service since 2007. Now its offering covers wide ranges from online lectures to public lectures by celebrities. The offering is not limited to domestic contents. Anyone in Korea can take a class about forgiveness lectured by Prof. Jacques Derrida in Paris. Absolutely fantastic. As of today, 3,953 courses are offered through KOCW. 25 courses are from CBNU with diverse subjects. CBNU has made a considerable effort to accommodate e-Learning system including KOCW offering. It keeps a policy for encouraging more faculty members to join in KOCW network by actively supporting the course development. Also, CBNU has announced an in-campus project for faculty members who wants to develop their lecture contents designed for class based on the e-Learning system. It looks like the time is just right.
Of course, the current KOCW system is far from perfection. The evaluation process should be further sophisticated. Technical and ethical issues are still hovering, especially regarding examination taking. The online lecture may lack communication between the lecturer and audiences. However, I am very excited to see the potential of OCW. Although we are not sure if all the conventional class lectures will be replaced by the online lecture in the higher education, it is no doubt that online learning, recently kicked into high gear in the era of the internet, could help millions of people around the world learn more effectively and less expensively, regardless of their nationality, gender, and age.