The site winners were chosen for their outstanding opencourseware (OCW) content and sites. The winners include the University of Sumatera Utara OpenCourseWare, the University of Michigan OERbit project and the Universidad de Alicante OpenCourseWare. The institutions were recognized at the 2011 OCWC Global Conference in Cambridge, Mass. on May 5.
“These sites represent some of the best work being done in the OCW community,” said Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of OCW Consortium. “They truly deserve the recognition and I congratulate the many people at these universities that have worked so hard on these projects.”
The University of Sumatera Utara OpenCourseWare was named the best new site and was chosen for this designation because it is sharing materials from 177 courses in 12 disciplines, materials from 20 textbooks along with offering all of the content in both English and Indonesian.
The technical achievement award was given to the University of Michigan for the innovative OERbit publishing platform. This project is a Drupal-based platform for OCW and open educational resource publication and provides a flexible publishing workflow.
The Universidad de Alicante OpenCourseWare was acknowledged with the landmark site award for having a platform that includes materials from 134 courses, innovations including integration with institutional repositories, export-to-wiki functionality and search and discoverability tools.
ABOUT UNIVERSITY OF SUMATERA UTARA:
University of Sumatera Utara (USU) established in 1952 is the oldest and most highly respected institution located in North Sumatera Province in Indonesia. At the beginning of its establishment, USU was prepared to be a center of higher education in Western parts of Indonesia. The University now has 14 faculties/school viz. Medicine, Law, Agriculture, Engineering, Dentistry, Economics, Humanities, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Political Science, Public Health, Pharmacy, Psychology, Nursing and Postgraduate. USU offers about 135 programmes comprised of graduate, undergraduate and diploma degrees. At present, there are more than 33.000 registered students studying in 120ha campus in the center of Medan.
In accordance with the vision of USU as a “University of Industry”, a tremendous progress is still running with the establishment of a teaching hospital at its premises of its main campus and the development of a new campus on a 300-hectare plot of land in a 15 km distance from main campus which can accommodate 64.000 students. The University will continue to strengthen its reputation in International achievements.
ABOUT USU OPENCOURSEWARE PROJECT:
USU OCW project was started in 2009 and officially became a member of OCW Consortium in January 2010 and since then there are 177 courses materials from 12 disciplines in the forms of slides presentation, handout and textbooks have been uploaded into the site and it’s still growing as we are still updating the contents and improve the presentation through video or multimedia content.
ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN:
Established in 1817, the University of Michigan is a global leader in health, law and public policy, the arts and humanities, science and technology, and many other academic disciplines. The university includes three campuses and has a total enrollment of more than 58,000 with over 8,000 faculty. The University of Michigan is also an OCW Consortium sustaining member.
ABOUT THE UNIVERSIDAD DE ALICANTE:
The Universidad de Alicante was created in October 1979. It was formed on the basis of the Centre for University Studies (CEU) which had come into being in 1968. In this way, Alicante recuperated university studies which had disappeared in 1834 when its predecessor, the University of Orihuela, closed after two centuries of education. The University of Orihuela was created by Papal Bull in 1545 and kept its doors open during two centuries (1610-1808). The Universidad de Alicante comprises about 50 degrees, more than 60 university departments and research unities and groups in social and legal sciences, experimental sciences, technological sciences, human sciences, education and health sciences, five research university centres (water, environment, geographical analysis, international economy) and serves more than 30,000 students.