Abstract:

In recent years, it has been developed an increasing trend towards making research and educational material freely available online. In this context, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was one of the pioneers in the free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials in 2002. This initiative is known as Open Course Ware (OCW) project.

The University of Jaén is no stranger to this reality and from the academic year 2008/2009 it has offered some contents freely accessible for anyone to read. These contents are part of the subjects that make up “Campus Andaluz Virtual” (CAV), an e-learning experience launched by all the Andalusian public universities and framed within the project “Universidad Digital”. The Department of Statistics and Operations Research has been participating in this project since its beginning, in the academic year 2006/2007.

However, with the introduction of the new degrees, those online subjects offered in CAV are doomed to disappear. The authors, as participants in the CAV experience, feel this fact as an opportunity of transforming the resources developed in high quality and interesting material for an OCW course.

As a matter of fact, the University of Jaén has offered the teaching staff an e-learning platform to develop OCW courses.
Therefore, in this paper the great challenge of developing a completely online open-access course is described.

Keywords:

OCW, online materials.