Open Course Ware

Someday, perhaps in the very near future, it’s possible that the world will no longer have a need for this site. That’s because a handful of forward-thinking institutions have started putting the complete contents of their courses online, for free. MIT is leading the field with 1100 courses online and recently other universities have joined in. In the US, these include Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, Utah State University, and Tufts. A large block of schools in China has committed to OCW, and schools in Japan and Vietnam are also on board.

From the MIT site:

MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based publication of the educational materials from the MIT faculty’s courses. This unique initiative enables the open sharing of the MIT faculty’s teaching materials with educators, enrolled students, and self-learners around the world. MIT OCW provides users with open access to the syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, even a selection of video lectures, from 1,100 MIT courses representing 34 academic disciplines and all five of MIT’s schools. The initiative will include materials from 1800 courses by the year 2007.

Link to the OpenCourseWare Finder, which will help you search the available courses from six schools.

Link to MIT’s Open Course Ware

Link to The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) at Utah State University, which is developing open source repository software and providing support so that anybody can run their own OCW.

Link to iberry.com, a site that aims to provide a comprehensive listing of the world’s OCW programs. The focus of this site is a little different than the sites above—this one collects individual professors’ websites that have useful resources. They’re working on a new database-based version for easier searching.

Many schools have started putting audio and video captures of lectures online. The resources are incredibly scattered, but this link is a great place to start.

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