UAF offers Oceans 111, and other courses, to the world

VICTORIA BARBER

December 04, 2008 at 10:06AM AKST

Starting in spring of 2009, students from Boston to Brazil and Beijing will be able to take courses from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which has recently joined a worldwide effort to offer academic courses free and online through the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

“Education should be more accessible to people,” said Curt Madison, director of the UAF Center for Distance Education.

Over 200 colleges and universities from 29 countries are already members of the consortium, including Johns Hopkins, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Notre Dame in the U.S. Anyone can access courses in art history at Paris Tech, ancient philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, or engineering quantum mechanics at the University of Tokyo simply by logging on.

OpenCourseWare Consortium’s executive director Terri Bays said that UAF’s expertise in ocean sciences would be an exciting asset to the consortium.

“The ocean sciences program ... stands to make a significant contribution to the OCW movement. In committing to provide a hands-on lab in this crucial subject to a worldwide audience for free, they are demonstrating the truly global impact OpenCourseWare can have,” Bays said.

Madison said that UAF intends to offer a “comprehensive” experience for its online audience. Rather than simply posting course materials and handouts online, the UAF Center for Distance Education will build entire courses, with reading lists, problem sets, demonstrations and other activities that simulate a classroom environment.

Those in the ocean sciences curriculum will be able to make observations, collect samples and share their results online.

“We’re experts in distance education … we’re going to make a structured approach to the learning so that students can go through it by themselves,” Madison said. “That doesn’t mean that they won’t have more questions, but students will have access to a domain of knowledge and will not have to register for anything, so there’s no risk.”
The courses are not offered for college credit. Madison said that the goal is to “prime the pump” of intellectual curiosity and energize people to become learners.

“Delivering real, useful information to real people doing real things serves a purpose in itself,” Madison said. “If they become comfortable with that then they’ll probably become curious to know more.”

Madison said that courses could be used to help potential students decide whether they want to commit to studying a subject in college or university, and even help them decide which institution they would like to attend by “seeing what an actual semester’s worth of stuff is going to look like.”

Madison said that it all fits in with UAF’s Center for Distance Learning’s goal to help provide a higher education for everyone.

“We really wanted to open access to the university’s intellectual resources to the people of Alaska. For that reason, we want people to be able to attend no matter where they live or what their resources are,” Madison said. “It’s what education ought to be.”

When asked whether offering up expensive courses online for free would steal business from the school — “If they can learn it all online we’d say ‘that’s great, good for you,” said Madison.

For more information about the OpenCourseWare Consortium, visit www.ocwconsortium.org. Courses from UAF will be available starting in spring 2009.

Victoria Barber can be reached at 907-348-2424 or 800-770-9830, ext. 424.