Project Name

CourseAPI 開放式課程資訊匯流學院

What is Open Education?

Open education is one of the main trend of thoughts in modern education, many universities have been making their educational resources in public for years. Using OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and its usage, to share knowledge with the society.

Develop learning horizons and improve motivation

Open courses not only represents the process of traditional education, but also have the effect of complementing with other educational ideas. Provide students who need support to develop their potential, support students with a specific target with learning and resources, is also a part of open education.

Open education could provide students with a specific target more resources, and also can provide students without a goal a "learning map", so that rather than normal education, it could provide a lot more content. 韓婉君 (2001) mentioned that the implement of open education, could highly increase the students' judgement, creativity and learning motivation.

Project Background

OpenCourseWare was first published by MIT in 2001, Taiwan has also started OpenCourseWares since 2007, by National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, many other universities started building their platforms after then, creating rich online course resources. One of the team members also found out the following problems about resources when learning:

  1. Open course data are unorganized, users need to search in multiple platforms, which isn't good for enhancing the data analysis and usage. Now, every open course platform's system all work individually, and there isn't a platform which integrate completely from these platforms. After we checking site-by-site, only a few platforms (such as OpenEdu) has provided resources of universities don't have their own platform. But even so, it still doesn't change the unorganized problem of OpenCourseWares, most of the integration platforms haven't updated for a long period of time. We also cannot find resources like "open course dataset" releasing information, and because of that, there are less usage and applications, such as "open course personal time chart", "open course comparing" are not even created.
  2. U18 (before 18 years old) students' learning hasn't integrated with open course resources. Although there are many educational institutions providing course resources, there still isn't a platform developed for U18 students for free and continued. For example, in junior high schools' technology education, after providing the introduction lessons, they didn't mention about open course resources in technology field, or in senior high schools' self-learning opportunity, provide such resources, we hope that we can provide current open course resources, to connect U18 learning.

More issues to be clarified include: (1) After students finished OCW lessons, can they get certified? (2) Many OCW platforms hasn't changed for a long period of time (3) Courses not created by universities, we hope that they can also be provided for U18 students. (The mentioned issues are from interviews with 6 high school, university students, reviewing their technology education experience in junior high school: https://bit.ly/3i5brEH, and the experience of current junior high student, educators).

Project goal

  1. Open Course Data/API: Research and develop the schema and data exchange plan for open courses.
  2. One-stop: Create one-stop open course searching website.
  3. Co-work: Communicate with open course operating institution and schools using open courses.
  4. SDG4: Conform to the fourth goal of United Nation Sustainable Development Goals: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Project Subjects

  1. Provide "learners" an open course integrated searching tool For users, our platform can provide better learning experience, and enhance the efficiency of learning.
  2. Provide "Learning autonomy development: institutions, educators" preparing resources Using our "open course integrated searching platform, course dataset", we could communicate with learning autonomy development institutions, to make the platform and the courses better. For example: Provide a platform that they can upload the open courses themselves, and fits the schema, so it'll be better for the information circulation, or supporting OCW courses uploading. The API service mentioned in this project, can also be used in all kinds of educational development institutions.