This paper shows the most innovative aspects of the Universia/UPM OpenCourseWare (OCW) project referred to globalization of higher education in a Latin-American environment and the sharing of knowledge.
The OpenCourseWare (OCW) project started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the year 2001, with the aim of offering pedagogical materials in an open and free of charge basis to society. At present, the MIT provide about 1800 courses freely and universally accessible on the net. The main objective of this proposal is to promote and develop higher education sharing, in a free and consistent way, the teaching resources with: other educators who may re-use them for their teaching work; students; graduates and anyone in general who wants to improve its knowledge.
This philosophy is being spread to the world main universities creating the OCW Consortium, in which more than 200 Universities and Institutions collaborate, being Universia and UPM members of the Consortium Board of Directors. Within this context new proposals, both technical and philosophical are arising for the freely disposal of teaching resources.
Universia, the Latin-American Universities net, gather at present about 1070 universities from 11 different countries. Among its goals are: the offer of many quality services to the university community, supporting teaching and scientific research projects, encouraging the use of new technologies and promoting the business – university relationship, in order to encourage a Latin-American site for knowledge.
Regarding OCW project, initially Universia promoted the translation of the contents of same MIT subjects into Spanish to start subsequently the creation of an OCW Consortium for Latin-American countries. By means of an agreement with the Technical University of Madrid, the OCW-Universia site have been developed, translated into 14 languages; counting at present with the participation of 35 Spanish Universities and 30 Latin-Americans and it has published about 200 courses.
The initial conditions to include Higher Educational Institutions in this project regard three different types: educational, technical and legal matters. For the first one, it is demanded the publication of teaching materials orderly structured with at least 10 courses. Within these materials it can be included all kind of resources: presentations, books, videos, simulations programs, etc. always with a common organization and appearances.
Regarding technical demands a globally and approachable site via Internet with the right quality must be maintained. Although it has not been a requirement, most of participants have used the technology of content management based on eduCommons, an Open Source project developed by Utah State University, which include very important normalized, flexible and personalized features.
Finally, the legal aspects came from the Creative Commons License that implies to offer and publish copyright cleared materials. The use, re-use and adaptation are allowed, provided the author of material is mentioned; they are not used with commercial purposes and they are offered, at least, within the same sharing conditions.
In the final document a detail descriptions of the main characteristics, previously mentioned, of the OCW Universia site will be made, the solutions and concrete structures adopted, the spreading an use of published contents and finally future work and development lines will be proposed.