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Taiwan OCWC (TOCWC) Launches, Provides Interesting Credit Option

The launch of the Taiwan OCW Consortium (TOCWC) is getting some notice, most recently from the Taiwan News:

A group of local universities formed an alliance Wednesday to provide the public with free online access to some of their formal course materials in the hope that more people will make use of the country’s higher education resources.
Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Taiwan OpenCourseWare Consortium (TOCWC), Wu Chung-yu, president of the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), said the joint effort will help break space and time barriers to knowledge exchange and communication.

You can see the OCWC members from Taiwan here. There’s also a neat element to the implementation: it looks like at least some participating universities may treat self-study with TOCW as a sort of Advanced Placement:

Noting that the new service does not require registration, Pai added that as a general rule, no degrees or certifications are awarded and the courses are purely for people who are interested in the subjects and would like to educate themselves.

However, she said NCTU has made it an exception that if high school graduates who apply to enter the school can pass the September exam on the subject they have been self-learning when their freshman semester begins, they will be eligible to apply for advanced credit standing.

A small step toward a credit model — and certainly one that is easy to emulate.