The Research On Open Educational Resources In Taiwan

Open Educational Resources(OER) have been developed for more than ten years in the world-wide, many countries and regions have participated, adhering to and practicing the"Open and Sharing" idea of OER, making efforts to pursuing one dream:provide high-quality learning resources for all.OER refers to free digital education resources from the Internet with open licenses, allowing users to freely use, remake and share.OER includes three kinds of resources:learning content class, utility class and open source implementation class.OER highlights the knowledge characteristic of public goods, basing on the Creative Common.Computer&network technology Change the learning mode in the past, promote the sharing and create a new learning environment, making interactive learning community possible.As an important part of the world, Taiwan started developing OER from MIT OCW translation to setting up local open courses and the establishment of Taiwan OpenCourseWare Consortium, Taiwan has formed its distinctive features.The government, social institutions, universities, teachers and students are trying their best to develop OER in Taiwan.However, there is hardly any document about OER of Taiwan, appearing theoretical blankness.OOPS, the first OER project in Taiwan, translate overseas high-quality open courses into Chinese, sharing the results with Chinese people all over the world.Taiwan Chiao Tung University is the first university to develop Taiwanese open courses and it released the first course in2006.Colleges and universities actively responded after Chiao Tung University, developing their own open courses.Taiwan OpenCourseWare Consortium established in2008. Taiwan Chiao Tung University set certification as the feature of its open courses, so a lot of video courses came into being. As a result, in Taiwan, OER is open courses-based and video courses-based in each university.Although video courses are the most popular, every school has its own distinguishing feature. Each university considers three factors to determine its feature:curriculum, teacher and administration. OOPS almost stagnated after the being of Taiwanese open courses in2006.Taiwan government has issued policy and fund to support OER development in each university, and altered Copyright Law to make sure OER run legally.Through questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews, the results prove that All Taiwanese have reached a consensus to abide by the copyright law and value others’ fruits of labour. Although the government has offered a lot of support, most universities will encounter financial pressure. Taiwanese students take interest as a starting point to use OER, instead of curriculum needs or examination stress. During the development, the north area taking a leading position in quality and quantity of open courses, compared to the south area. The northern students are more familiar with OER than the southern ones, but have a lower desire to use OER.