Open Education

As I said before, our exams are going on now. One of our exams was "Electrical Systems on board Ships". This was a subject taught by a guest lecturer and as a result even though the topics for the semester was covered, the real topics that were required for attempting the exam was not taught satisfactorily. We unfortunately came to know of this problem only a few days before the exam. (That was when we checked the question papers). Thus the search for notes/text/any other materials started.

For many a topics, I turned to the trusty web and for some topics, answers were found (like GMDSS- Global Maritime Distress and Safety System) while for others (like circuit diagram for DOL starters), answers were quite unsatisfactory.

This led me to think. The Internet is an instrument of sharing and collaboration. We have thousands of graduate level students in Kerala itself. If we could share our notes, essays, assignments and other education materials online freely, it would greatly improve our knowledge.

Is it already there on the WWW?

I started searching and yes, the concept is not a new one. MIT had started making its course materials available online from a few years ago. Now many other universities have course materials online for downloading by students.
http://www.oercommons.org/ is a very good collection of such downloadable coursewares. You can easily search for topics and download materials for study such as presentations, videos, notes, etc.

For school level, Wikipedia School-Section is awesome. There is even an option for downloading the complete site so that it can be used offline.

One thing I noticed is that participation by students is very low. Especially here in India, its almost zero. By participation, I mean both using the available resources as well as contributing.

There should actually be an open education center where contributions are by students. Kind of like "for the students, by the students and of the students". Students could submit their seminar presentations, essays, assignments or even lecture notes. These are invariably more useful for students than materials by professors.

• Students could easily add their materials to different sections like medicine, engineering, management, etc.
• Class notes, written assignments, etc could be scanned and submitted for use by other students.
• Previous exam papers could also be submitted so that preparation for exams is easy.Forums can be established where various subjects and topics are discussed.

To ensure participation, users could be required to submit at least a single material per month. Peer ratings and review can be put to good use to find the best materials.


Of course this leads to the problem of plagiarizing by the students. In my opinion this can be solved by having the students submit their assignments in soft copy and using a program to compare it with the database of the resource to see if it shows excessive similarity with any one file.