posted by user21 on February 12, 2009 | 0 comments
Have you heard about MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu)? Where you can download course materials from 1800 MIT courses, and view lot's of lectures online? Did you know that China has a massive OpenCourseWare program, centrally funded by the government, that involves 600 universities, and as much as 10,000 courses?

These have lot's of material - typically lesson plans, introductions to the subject, lecture notes for each class, and many of them also have videos of entire lectures. This is not only great to practice your Chinese, but also very fascinating - find out how Chinese teach journalism, or political science, or macroeconomics! You can find an index to the top-level courses (around 1500) at http://www.jingpinke.com.

I am currently researching this program, and I just gave a talk (in English) at an Open Ed conference in Houston. I recorded the talk, and you can watch the slideshow where I show examples of some of the courses, and also talk about some research perspectives, here: http://www.slideshare.net/houshuang/global-concept-local-practices-state-of-the-research-on-ocw-in-chinese-1010243

Stian
signin to comment
orbital on February 12, 2009 | reply
Spent a few minutes looking around the site. Tried to find some of the online materials for the humanities and economics courses. Couldn't come up with anything more than course descriptions and links to generic and fairly uninteresting descriptive content.

What is of educational value on the site?

Perhaps I'm missing the point, but without actual content this project looks more like a bandwagon effort to secure funding and less like a serious effort at promoting educational resources. Right now the site is just reinforcing my belief that Chinese university educations are close to totally useless.
imron on February 16, 2009 | reply
Click on the 资源中心 section of the navigation bar, then choose your area, e.g. 经济学类, then click either 视频 in the search box, or 教学录像 on the left hand options menu. Then you'll get a whole bunch of lectures such as 微观经济学, 国际金融市场创新 etc.

Hmmm, although all the videos I just checked then only seem to go for 30 secs.