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The free and open publication of course materials (OpenCourseWare or OCW) was initially undertaken by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other universities primarily to share educational resources among educators (Abelson, 2007). OCW, however, and more in general open educational resources (OER), have also provided well-documented opportunities for all learners, including the so-called "informal learners" and "independent learners" (Carson, 2005; Mulder, 2006, p. 35). Universities have also increasingly documented clear benefits for specific target groups such as secondary education students and lifelong learners seeking to enter formal postsecondary education programs. In addition to benefitting learners, OCW publication has benefitted the publishing institutions themselves by providing recruiting advantages. Finally enrollment figures from some institutions indicate that even in the case of the free and open publication of materials from online programs, OCW does not negatively affect enrollment. This paper reviews evaluation conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), and Open Universiteit Nederland (OUNL) concerning OCW effects on higher education participation and student recruitment. (Contains 5 tables and 4 footnotes.)

The need for public health knowledge is ever increasing, but the educational options have been limited to coursework delivered by academics to individuals who can afford the cost of tuition at public health institutions. To overcome this disparity, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) has joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-initiated OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement to publish and share its collection of course content with the public at no charge. The JHSPH OCW project began in 2005 with funding support from the Hewlett Foundation. Its publishing process was integrated into the school-wide web supplement system for managing course content. To date, content from more than 60 graduate-level courses has been published, drawing an average of 40,000 visitors per month. OCW provides resources for faculty and students, both within and outside JHSPH in their pursuit of public health education. An OCW Image Library was created to provide object-level access to illustrations produced by JHSPH OCW to replace copyright-protected images removed from faculty course materials. Internal support and external assistance are both essential for the success of an Open Educational Resources (OER) programme; JHSPH OCW would have been impossible without administrative buy-in, faculty participation, an adaptable technology infrastructure, Hewlett Foundation funding, and shared wisdom from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is an ideal time for institutions to develop their own OER programmes, possibly by working with the OCW Consortium, through which institutions have access to the collective experience of existing OER producers.

Over the last three decades, data have become ubiquitous and cheap. This transition has accelerated over the last five years and training in statistics, machine learning, and data analysis has struggled to keep up. In April 2014, we launched a program of nine courses, the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization, which has now had more than 4 million enrollments over the past five years. Here, the program is described and compared to standard data science curricula as they were organized in 2014 and 2015. We show that novel pedagogical and administrative decisions introduced in our program are now standard in online data science programs. The impact of the Data Science Specialization on data science education in the U.S. is also discussed. Finally, we conclude with some thoughts about the future of data science education in a data democratized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]