In my opinion, Open Educational Resources (OER) are the most compelling evidence that the world of learning is truly open. Many academic institutions are embracing the philosophy of knowledge sharing, so instead of keeping their course content confidential and private, they are releasing it to anyone. OpenCourseWare (OCW) was an initiative started by MIT and several other institutions have joined it gradually. According to the MIT’s OCW website (http://ocw.mit.edu/about/ocw-consortium/) in 2008 there were 250 universities that formed part of the OCW consortium.
Language is a critical issue of OERs and OCWs. Even though there are online products that translate automatically from one language to another, the translation is not entirely accurate most of the times. So, it is remarkable that there are organizations comprised mainly of people who volunteer their time and efforts to translating the OERs and OCWs content and to adapt it into a specific culture. One of these organizations is the OpenSource OpenCourseWare Prototype System (OOPS) lead by Lucifer Chu. OOPS is in the process of translating and adapting MIT OpenCourseWare into Chinese.
In spite of people’s good intentions to contribute their time and effort to translating the courseware, there is always the risk of the quality of the translation, especially if they do not master the content area they are trying to translate. Critics of organizations like OOPS attack mainly the quality of the translations, arguing that “no information is better than wrong information”. To help improving the quality of the translation process, organizations should not only depend on the work of volunteers but also should consider hiring professional editors who review the final stages of the process. Having access to content about any topic in your own language is only the first step. A second important step is for other academic institutions to design a plan about how to make use of the content in the most effective way.
Thanks Miguel for your comments. In addition to language and language quality issues, there is also a problem on the quality of information in the open world. Sure thing, we are learning too much with the open sources; however, how about your statement "no information is better than wrong information". So, how can we control the flow of wrong information to the web? OR do we need to?
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