Learning for Free Online: The OpenCourseWare Movement

Submitted by G.A. Admin

Learning Online
The internet is giving birth to a revolution in learning that is changing the way we educate ourselves in and beyond the classroom. E-learning initiatives such as OpenCourseWare (OCW) projects are aimed at making university-level course materials available online at no charge whatsoever. The driving philosophy behind this project is parallel to that of open-source software; by making education accessible and open to everyone, we can ultimately increase innovation and share the global benefits. The OCW movement was spearheaded by MIT’s OpenCourseWare program in October of 2002, which continues to offer OCW course materials under the Creative Commons license.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is one of the major contributors to the OCW movement which partners with educational institutions to extend the reach and impact of opencourseware, ensures the long-term sustainability of opencourseware projects, and fosters the development of additional opencourseware projects.

For organizations looking to share knowledge online, Utah State University has released a free open-source content management system that allows you to develop and manage an open access collection of course materials.

Since 2002, a number of universities across the world have created OCW projects, here are a few:

North America
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon
John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Irvine
Utah State University OpenCourseWare
Tufts University OpenCourseWare
Capilano University OpenCourseWare (Canada)

Asia
China Open Resources for Education (NGO)
Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium
United Nations University (Japan)
Tokyo Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare
National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (India)
Korea University OpenCourseWare
National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan)
FETP OpenCourseWare (Vietnam)

Europe
ParisTech Libres Savoirs (France)
Grenoble Ecole de Management (France)
OpenCourseWare Universia (Spain)
Universidad de Sevilla (Spain)

Latin America
Universidad de Monterrey (Mexico)
Universidad Nacional de Colombia