Institute for Information Management and Communication, Kyoto University
Kyoto University tosa@media.kyoto-u.ac.jp minoh@media.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Kyoto University Open Course Ware (OCW) started in 2005. Prof. Miyagawa of
MIT visited Kyoto University to appeal the importance of introducing OCW into
Kyoto University to Prof. Oike, who was Kyoto University President at that time.
Pres. Oike clicked with him and entrusted the work of establishing Kyoto
University OCW to Prof. Minoh, one of the coauthors of this paper. After that, OCW
Preparatory Committee was established and the members were called from each
Faculty. This is the history of the beginning of Kyoto University Open Course Ware.
Prof. Miyagawa often refers to the results of open-source projects of MIT (like GNU) as an example of open atmosphere that fits with OCW.
What does open education bring us? It gives us the way to share our knowledge and education. It creates social network of educational community that is open to the world. The world's intellectual standard rises thanks to it. This is one of a perfect model of open education. However even if we can achieve them, there must be many unexpected barriers.
As a first step we started to ask teachers to provide their lecture information for
OCW. Such information forms the basis of Kyoto University OCW. Then the contents of the OCW have gradually increased and now the university can appeal to the world through OCW. The teachers can freely use world's OCW for their teaching materials. OCW is different from E-learning. It can be called as media for announcing “today” of university education. Access from outside of university is much larger than internal one in most universities. In Kyoto University 80% of the entire access is from outside. Because OCW is an educational digital content, the quality is important. But the quality is the first step. Someday the quantity exceeds

the quality. The definition of OCW by MIT was, at first, the publication of lecture notes. The teachers made PDF of their lecture notes to publish. But the contents were not so much because normal lectures had no preparation for copyrights. Many teachers didn't open their lecture notes except of their students. After that, video streaming on the Internet became popular around 2008. They started to stream videos of their lectures. Kyoto University OCW started to publish streaming of recorded lectures at the time. Then more teachers asked to stream their lecture videos on OCW. Kyoto University OCW now has more than 1000 lecture videos. In fact, the teachers have their hopes to publish their lecture videos to appeal to the viewers.
To whom is OCW beneficial? Below is the list of the several groups of people who would be able to receive benefit from OCW.
•For those who want to obtain high-level knowledge.
•For those who want to enter the university.
•For graduates who want to re-learn the information they obtained.
•For faculty members who want to develop their future career.
•For faculty members who want to brush their teaching skills.
•For those who want to investigate learning/education models, education methodology, education support, self-learning, etc.
At the same time it is important to identify which information should be kept open and which should be kept closed.
Below are the two typical examples of OCW lectures that show the effectiveness of the use of OCW.
3.1 Case study 1: "Introduction to Foreign Literature on Agricultural
Machinery"
This is a tele-education course focusing English presentation aimed for graduate students carried out in collaboration with National Taiwan University (NTU).
Significant improvements of students’ attitudes such as seriously preparing for the class, actively participating the presentation, etc. have been observed. Also the

communication between NTU students studying at Kyoto University and NTU faculty members has been significantly improved.
3.2 Case study 2: ”Let’s understand the importance of organic molecules in our daily life”
This is an introductory lecture for the 1 st grade undergraduate students of Kyoto
University focusing the role of various types of organic molecules in our daily life.
By utilizing visual material distribution featured by OCS, it became possible for students who are not familiar to chemistry to easily understand the molecular structure of various kinds of materials in our daily life.
Based on the success of the first stage activities of Kyoto University OCW, we plan to introduce several improvements into it and provide more effective OCW in the future
4.1 Improvement of OCW Infrastructure
Below is the list of several improvements to be done at the infrastructure level.
•Automatic input of syllabus utilizing speech recognition function.
•Speed up of the OCW system.
•The connection with intra-LMS (learning management system) makes it possible for faculty members to upload their own contents created by CMS (contents management system) onto OCW.
•Connection with tele-learning system.
4.2 Systematic Promotion of OCW in Each Faculty
At the same time further promotion of Kyoto University OCW within the university is necessary. Below are the several activities that would be necessary to realize this.
•Establishment of university level OCW management committee.
•Systematic promotion of OCW utilizing incentive budget of each faculty.
–Faculty of Agriculture.
–Center for Field Research on Education.
•Promotion of English version of OCW
–Global COE, English lectures, International symposium/conferences organized by

Kyoto University.
•Upload of various kinds of field studies onto OCW would prepare adequate lecture materials for those students who are not familiar for such field studies.
•Upload of open campus video onto OCW would make it possible for high school students in distant place to obtain detailed information about Kyoto University.
Based on the necessity for the further improvement of Kyoto University OCW OCW
Management Committee has been established. The direct effect of the committee is that it made possible for each faculty to recognize the importance of OCW.
The first job of the committee was to introduce various kinds of new functions into
OCW for the easier use of OCW: caption of lecture talk using voice recognition, visualization of syllabus, tool for advanced search, etc.
Speech recognition function
Bellow figure is the lecture by Prof. Yamanaka, Novel Prize winner on iPS research in 2012. The caption of lecture talk is obtained using voice recognition. In the future
Japanese captions will be automatically translated into English.

Tool for advanced search
TSUBAKI system developed by Prof. Kurohashi will be implemented in the new
OCW system. TSUBAKI is a new search system that takes semantic ambiguity of each word, synonyms, etc. into consideration.
OCW Management Committee is being held periodically and active discussions have been carried out for the fundamental role of Kyoto University OCW and also its future direction. Some of the opinions expressed in the previous several meetings are that OCW should focus on the work to collect and archive knowledge and wisdom owned by Kyoto University and that how to utilize OCW should depend on each faculty. Below are several examples of the opinions expressed by several
Faculties on how to utilize OCW.
•To utilize OCW for the promotion of the faculty to overseas and to recruit students from overseas.
•To utilize OCW to archive huge amount of lectures.
•To distribute Chinese version of OCW to Chinese students.
•To archive and to distribute various kinds of lectures/presentations by internal and invited researchers.
As a future direction of OCW we believe that we should have more fundamental concept for future education. As such future target we have proposed the concept of
“Open Education.” Although the concept of open education is not mature and we are in the middle of the discussion, we have already started some preliminary trial aiming this direction.
7.1 Basic Contents for Future Kyoto University OCW
All the lecture videos of 90 mins are now being shortened to about 10 mins and is tagged with several adequate key words. Then it is registered to the archive system developed on the Sony archive system called.
7.2 Promotion of Secondary Utilization of OCW Contents.

We collaborate with prof. Tajino of High Level Education Promotion Institute and have developed a tool for English e-learning. This tool has been used in our academic listening class since last October.
[1] Kyoto University Open Course Ware http://ocw.kyoto-u.ac.jp/
[2] Kyoto University Open Course Ware YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/KyoDaiOcw
[3] OCW Content Management System
http://educommons.com/downloads/educommons/