Paper presented in IDEA 2008 & later published in Book form "ODL system in transition" / Open Courseware is nothing but the repository of the study and learning materials in digital form in the web which is open for every user i.e. Open Access. These repositories envisage to store, index, preserve, distribute and share the digital learning resources with any time access offering interoperability. On the other hand, e-learning covers a myriad set of applications, and processes such as computer based learning, web-based learning, virtual classrooms, etc. What is most significant about the method is that it ensures faster learning at comparatively reduced cost and gives access to more learning resources. In India, a number of institutions are digitizing their course materials and a good number of open courseware have been established e.g. eGyankosh-a National Digital Repository, CEC Learning Object Repository, Indo- German eGurukul on Digital Libraries, NPTEL, NCERT Online Textbooks, UNESCOSALIS e-Learning Portal, etc. This paper presents a scenario of the Open Courseware initiatives in India that can be helpful and necessary to the e-learners.

Master of Engineering (Research) / Educational standards are having a significant impact on e-Learning. They allow for better exchange of information among different organizations and institutions. They simplify reusing and repurposing learning materials. They give teachers the possibility of personalizing them according to the student’s background and learning speed. Thanks to these standards, off-the-shelf content can be adapted to a particular student cohort’s context and learning needs. The same course content can be presented in different languages. Overall, all the parties involved in the learning-teaching process (students, teachers and institutions) can benefit from these standards and so online education can be improved. To materialize the benefits of standards, learning resources should be structured according to these standards. Unfortunately, there is the problem that a large number of existing e-Learning materials lack the intrinsic logical structure required, and further, when they have the structure, they are not encoded as required. These problems make it virtually impossible to share these materials. This thesis addresses the following research question: How to make the best use of existing open learning resources available on the Internet by taking advantage of educational standards and specifications and thus improving content reusability?In order to answer this question, I combine different technologies, techniques and standards that make the sharing of publicly available learning resources possible in innovative ways. I developed and implemented a three-stage tool to tackle the above problem. By applying information extraction techniques and open e-Learning standards to legacy learning resources the tool has proven to improve content reusability. In so doing, it contributes to the understanding of how these technologies can be used in real scenarios and shows how online education can benefit from them. In particular, three main components were created which enable the conversion process from unstructured educational content into a standard compliant form in a systematic and automatic way. An increasing number of repositories with educational resources are available, including Wikiversity and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseware. Wikivesity is an open repository containing over 6,000 learning resources in several disciplines and for all age groups [1]. I used the OpenCourseWare repository to evaluate the effectiveness of my software components and ideas. The results show that it is possible to create standard compliant learning objects from the publicly available web pages, improving their searchability, interoperability and reusability.

Master of Engineering (Research) / Educational standards are having a significant impact on e-Learning. They allow for better exchange of information among different organizations and institutions. They simplify reusing and repurposing learning materials. They give teachers the possibility of personalizing them according to the student’s background and learning speed. Thanks to these standards, off-the-shelf content can be adapted to a particular student cohort’s context and learning needs. The same course content can be presented in different languages. Overall, all the parties involved in the learning-teaching process (students, teachers and institutions) can benefit from these standards and so online education can be improved. To materialize the benefits of standards, learning resources should be structured according to these standards. Unfortunately, there is the problem that a large number of existing e-Learning materials lack the intrinsic logical structure required, and further, when they have the structure, they are not encoded as required. These problems make it virtually impossible to share these materials. This thesis addresses the following research question: How to make the best use of existing open learning resources available on the Internet by taking advantage of educational standards and specifications and thus improving content reusability?In order to answer this question, I combine different technologies, techniques and standards that make the sharing of publicly available learning resources possible in innovative ways. I developed and implemented a three-stage tool to tackle the above problem. By applying information extraction techniques and open e-Learning standards to legacy learning resources the tool has proven to improve content reusability. In so doing, it contributes to the understanding of how these technologies can be used in real scenarios and shows how online education can benefit from them. In particular, three main components were created which enable the conversion process from unstructured educational content into a standard compliant form in a systematic and automatic way. An increasing number of repositories with educational resources are available, including Wikiversity and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseware. Wikivesity is an open repository containing over 6,000 learning resources in several disciplines and for all age groups [1]. I used the OpenCourseWare repository to evaluate the effectiveness of my software components and ideas. The results show that it is possible to create standard compliant learning objects from the publicly available web pages, improving their searchability, interoperability and reusability.

This study examined factors affecting withdrawal rates using a selection of high school and college-level courses from BYU Independent Study (BYU IS). Exposure to BYU Open Courseware (OCW) curriculum prior to registration had no significant effect on withdrawal rates. Prior enrollment in a BYU IS course had a statistically significant positive effect on withdrawal rates, a surprising result. Further HLM analysis of 83,707 students indicated that at least some of the variability in student withdrawal behavior at the high school level was influenced by prior enrollment, the online course format, and courses offered in the fine arts. For both high school and college courses, students enrolled in an online (rather than paper-based "correspondence") course were less likely to withdraw than their paper-based peers. Finally, for college courses, students enrolled in lower division courses were more likely to withdraw from their courses. Students enrolled in Career and Counseling, Engineering Technology, Life Sciences, Family Home and Social Sciences, College of Fine Arts and Communications, Marriott School of Business, or Religious Education courses were less likely to withdraw from their courses than students enrolling in courses from other colleges.