Open Content and OpenCourseWare - a growing phenomena
Open content, as in open and free e-books, and OpenCourseWare is a phenomena that seems to be spreading rapidly. The development of open licensing models, like the Creative Commons license (CC), is probably one important reason.
This is a sound development. The course material becomes feely available for anyone to use, while the real value of educational institutions - teachers, tutors and researches etc - are regarded as the most valuable assets: they are what adds the missing dimension to a course, and that vouch for quality and that makes the learning opportunity an interesting, and inspiring intellectual experience. The contents are just props, and OpenCourseWare becomes "marketing material" while the actual courses becomes the means by which educational institutions competes, on what is becoming a global market for education.
I hope that this development continues, as it is a good way of sharing. Knowledge should be free for anyone anywhere! Something that we will all benefit from in the end.
As I was looking for some material on programming Ruby, I found that the amount of available free- and open content has increased enormously since I did a similar inventory about two years ago. Below are some of the most interesting places for OpenCourseWare:
The Free TechBooks.com that contains a lot of good and free material that can be used for teaching - including for Ruby… The material seems to be mainly of high quality as well.
This site lists free online computer science and engineering books and lecture notes, all of which are freely and legally available over the Internet.
Throughout this site, other terms are used to refer to a book, such as text, textbook, document or note.
Another goldmine (that is commonly referred) is the MIT Open CourseWare site, where there are a lot of free, high quality teaching material for a variety of subjects.
a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.
Another free resource is Notre Dame OpenCourseWare. A resource that is similar to MIT OpenCourseWare in that it covers a variety of subjects.
Notre Dame Opencourseware (OCW) is a pilot project launched in September 2006 by the University of Notre Dame. Funded by a two-year grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and hosted by the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning, the project seeks to publish 30 courses focused on the human condition. From now, the Web site already includes more than 20 courses fully available online related to Asia, American, African, Arabic and Middle East Studies and much more. The Notre Dame Opencourseware (OCW) project is being part of the OCW Consortium, including more than 100 higher education institutions from around the world.
The Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is yet another good, and free resource that spans over several subject areas.
A collection of "cognitively informed," openly available and free online courses and course materials that enact instruction for an entire course in an online format.
An interesting service is also the OpenCourseWare Finder , which is a service for searching and browsing Open Courseware from several educational institutions.
The Sofia Projects is yet another project providing free courseware. The Sofia Projet have their focus on the college level.
The ultimate vision of the Sofia initiative is to support and advance education by making high-quality content freely available on the Web for learners and faculty across the nation and the world. The Sofia initiative encourages the publication and free exchange of community college-level course materials on the World Wide Web.
Another provider of free course material is the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning in India.
The main objective of NPTEL program is to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum based video and web courses. Currently samples from approximately 70 courses offered by faculty in various departments and to students at all levels (B.Tech, M.Tech, M.S., M.Sc., Ph.D.) are given here. Approximately 140 courses are in various stages of preparation and distribution through internet.
The Rice University’s Connexions is another initiative, and it looks slightly different from the other initiatives as it takes on a wider perspective involving the whole process including: developing, publishing, sharing and using. The use a Creative Commons license about which there is an article on http://creativecommons.org/education/connexions.
Connexions is a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help
* authors publish and collaborate
* instructors rapidly build and share custom courses
* learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines.
Open-Of-Course for Free Content Courses and Tutorials is a service that offers free, and open courses (and corresponding content). The content seems to be a wide variation of subjects and levels (and maybe also in quality?). Well worth a look though.
Open-of-course is an initiative of Mingos and Freelancenetwerk, two small dutch companies that work together. Because of that we also have a great interest in and commitment to free software and free information. We found that there is a lot of free educational material available already but it’s not always easy to find.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is another initiative that tries to gather the open content initiatives of several organizations in one place. The OpenCourseWare Consortium expresses a higher misson as well…
An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.
OER Commons - an open resource from K-12
OER Commons is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and professors (from pre-K to graduate school) can access their colleagues’ course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today’s classrooms. It uses Web 2.0 features (tags, ratings, comments, reviews, and social networking) to create an online experience that engages educators in sharing their best teaching and learning practices.
The Open University, one of the major players in Distance Learning, has launched an initiative called "OpenLearn". It is made available under the parol: "Making educational resources freely avaliable"
Free and open educational resources for learners and educators around the world.
You are in the LearningSpace where Open University learning materials are freely available for you to study in your own time, away from any formal teaching environment.
University of Tokyo have their UT’s OpenCourseWare. They offer a variety of courses and OpenCourseware.
A free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world.
UT OCW supports one of "the opening of the gates of knowledge" programs.
Open ContentOnline is another OpenCoursware Search site, as well as the Open Courseware Directory
Other resources on Open Content and OpenCourseware:
- This list is being continuously updated
- Open Source Content in Education (an article by George Siemens)
- The Regina Declaration (By Stephen Downes)
- The Instructional Use of Learning Objects (A free e-book about Learning Objects)
- Innovations in the Reuse of Electronic Learning Materials: drivers and challenges (opening keynote, by Derek Morrison, at the Open University Business School on Friday (23 September 2005) for the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s conference)
- The Wikipedia definition of Open Courseware
- Learn for free online (A BBC article)
- The Opencourseware How To at MIT
- Wharton OpenCourseWare -Knowledge Project
- BioDirectory: OpenCourseWare - "Open Source comes to University Lecture Course Material"
- Preserving public domain books (An earlier article of mine)
- The Center for Open Sustainable Learning
- Educommons (eduCommons is an OpenCourseWare)
- Start an OCW (About how to start your own OpenCourseware project)
- OEDb » Online Education Database
- OECD report on Open Edcational Resources. Titeled: Giving Knowledge for Free: THE EMERGENCE OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
I am sure that there are many other interesting initiatives out there that I have missed - so please suggest additional OpenCourseWare sites to add to this list!
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