Universities receiving subsidies from the government should share their academic resources by putting courses online that can be downloaded for free by the public, an education advocacy group said.
The Foundation of Fantasy, Culture and Arts said that such a practice, commonly known as OpenCourseWare (OCW), not only allows members of the community to expand their knowledge, but also gives taxpayers an opportunity to see where their money is going.
“I, for example, have no idea how my tax money is contributing to the advancement of higher education in the country,” CEO and founder Lucifer Chu (朱學恆) said.
Since its establishment in 2004, the foundation has been cooperating with prestigious universities such as Yale and Harvard to translate OCW classes into Chinese. Their offerings include everything from philosophy classes to discussions on human sexuality.
Chu and 2,700 part-time volunteer translators have so far produced more than 1,000 such courses, with 100 containing high-quality video lectures. The classes are free for users in Taiwan to download.
“To my knowledge, there are a few Taiwanese universities trying to build their own OCW framework, but the quality is far from satisfactory,” Chu said.
“The problem lies in that most teachers are camera-shy or technophobic and school officials tend to get intimidated by the cost even before they start assessing such a proposal,” he said.
He said NT$500,000 would be sufficient for posting eight courses each semester. Doing so would not only benefit thousands of eager learners among the public, but would also help university students who want to review their courses a second time.
“How is this not cost--effective?” he asked.
Video-taping headline lectures at one university and broadcasting them to other universities would save on travel costs, since the lecturer, very likely coming from abroad, would only need to show up at one venue to make the recording, he said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching