An Overview to Open Courseware: An Example of the Turkish Academy of Sciences

Abstract

This study reviews the open courseware approach, its benefits and examines open courseware platform of Turkish Academy of Sciences. This platform has 81 courses in 22 different categories. Our study analyzes usage data of the platform that is obtained from Google Analytics, which includes more than 300.000 visitors’ transaction within a two-year period (January 15, 2011- January 15, 2013). The statistics showed that this platform had been visited 445,982 times by 315,830 people since January, 2011. It was observed that the development of the platform’s content and promotion activities had a positive effect on the traffic of the site. On the other hand, it was seen that countrywide use of the platform was limited and some cities of Turkey did not use the platform at all. Turkey has a major potential in terms of its universities, students and academics’ numbers. However, the advancements in the world related to the open courseware projects make Turkey’s current efforts questionable. It is obvious that, Turkey must examine the past activities and make some critical plans for the future actions.