Assessing Awareness and use of Open Courseware Among Incoming Students

 One of presentations I was able to attend discussed the effect open courseware had on incoming students at John Hopkins School of Public Health. While John Hopkins University only serves medical/public health students I believe a number of their findings can be beneficial for colleges and universities that have an array of degrees and majors.   They found that over half of incoming students knew about the open courseware available from John Hopkins, yet only 35% of those who knew about it actually used it. (Keep in mind this is referring to incoming students) As would be expected the knowledge and use of open courseware increased as students progressed in their studies (yet the presentation was specifically focused on incoming students).

 

The findings of John Hopkins said that of those who knew about the Open Courseware, 23% of them took that into account when choosing to go to John Hopkins. The biggest benefit I can see with Open Courseware for incoming students is that if perspective students were able to get online and look at the information and resources used by all different courses they may find things that really interest them and thus decide to go to John Hopkins over another school that doesn’t have such information available (even when in reality both schools could be teaching all the same courses they just haven’t made the information available.) Because of the positive effect the open courseware can have on students it gives the University another reason to spend more time and money to make more high quality information available.