Open Courseware Repositories: An Analysis of Content Diversity and Visibility

Open Courseware (OCW) is one of the www's indispensable tools which are highly useful for stakeholders. But the utility and visibility of such resources can increase manifolds if they are highly index-able and visible through search engines. This paper is an endeavour to assess format diversity, web traffic, and visibility of select OCW repositories. The work sheds light on retrieval efficiency of different search engines vis-à-vis OCW. Open Courseware repositories that were enlisted under science and Technological Subjects in ‘Catalogue of Open Courseware Consortium’ were sifted and selected after thorough review of their OA policies. Out of 20 repositories indentified only 18 proved to be AO. A total of four repositories were short listed by way of random sampling for in-depth study in terms of their content diversity and visibility by prominent and special search engines (07). Among various formats, pdf is the most common format (52.31 per cent) archived by OCW repositories. OCW visibility differs from search engine. ‘Google’ turned to be most reliable tool by retrieving 73.58 per cent OCWs while ‘incywincy’ retrieved none. General search engines (73.58 per cent – 52.44 per cent) have shown very good performance compared to special search engines (42.68 per cent – 0 per cent). Among the repositories ‘Open Michigan’ is most visible Open Courseware repository with 70 per cent average visibility whereas ‘NJIT’ is least visible (29.82 per cent.)