Horla Varlan

This week, the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of OpenCourseWare. The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the materials from all 2,000 of the university’s courses on the Web.

With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described in her opening remarks at yesterday’s meeting as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: “the tradition of the global intellectual commons.”

We have looked here before at how OCW has shaped education in the last ten years, but in many ways much of the content that has been posted online remains very much “Web 1.0.” That is, while universities have posted their syllabi, handouts, and quizzes online, there has not been — until recently — much “Web 2.0″ OCW resources — little opportunity for interaction and engagement with the material.

But as open educational resources and OCW increase in popularity and usage, there are a number of new resources out there that do offer just that. You probably already know about: Khan Academy and Wikipedia, for example. But in the spirit of 10 years of OCW, here’s a list of 10 cool OER and OCW resources that you might not know about, but should know:

1. P2PU: The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project in which anyone can participate. Volunteers facilitate the courses, but the learners are in charge. P2PU leverages both open content and the open social web, with a model for lifelong learning.
2. OpenStudy: OpenStudy is a social learning network where independent learners and traditional students can come together in a massively-multiplayer study group. Through OpenStudy, learners can find other working in similar content areas in order to support each other and answer each others’ questions. OpenStudy supports a number of study groups, including those focused on several MIT OCW courses.
3. NITXY: NIXTY is building a learning management platform that supports open education resources. Rather than an LMS that closes off both academic resources and academic progress, NIXTY is designed to support open courses so that schools, teachers, and students’ work is not necessarily closed off from the rest of the Web.
4. OER Glue: Still under development, OER Glue will be a site to watch. The Utah-based startup is building a browser-based tool that will allow students and teachers to “glue” together OER resources online. Rather than having to copy-and-paste resources into a new setting, OER Glue will reuse and integrate resources.

1. iUniv: iUniv is a Japanese startup that is building web and mobile apps to support and make social video and audio OCW content. Resources can be shared to Twitter, Facebook, and Evernote so that students can actively engage in discussions around OCW content.
2. OCWSearch: OCW Search is a search engine dedicated, as the name suggests, to helping learners find OCW content. The project is, unfortunately, no longer under development, but it does index ten universities’ OCW content, including MIT, Notre Dame, and The Open University UK.
3. Smarthistory: Smarthistory is a free and open multimedia website that demonstrates how very heavy, pricey, and obsolete the traditional art history textbook is.
4. CK-12: The CK-12 Foundation’s Flexbook platform provides free, collaboratively-built and openly-licensed digital textbooks for K-12. Much of the content is standards based.
5. Flat World Knowledge: This is a college textbook publisher whose books are published under an open license. This allows professors to customize the books they order – edit, add to, mix-up – or use as-is. Students can access the books online for free or can pay for print-on-demand and audiobook versions.
6. Connextions: Connextions is a repository of educational content, containing over 17,000 openly licensed learning modules.

If you know of any other great OER and OCW resources, please let us know in the comments!

Flickr:CriCristina

This month marks the tenth anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare, the university’s initiative to provide free and open access to its core academic content — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from over 2000 MIT course.

The decision by the MIT faculty in 2001 to allow anyone to use their course content was a seminal move,  one that had a profound effect on democratizing education. (You can read the original New York Times story here.) Since then, over 100 million people have accessed MIT’s materials.

In honor of ten years of MIT OCW, here are 10 ways in which this important Open CourseWare initiative has changed education.

1. CREATING THE MOLD. While MIT OpenCourseWare remains the flagship institution and initiative, it has been joined by multiple other colleges and universities that now make their course content available for learners. These include Brigham Young University, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, Notre Dame and UC Irvine — and that’s just in the United States.
2. GOING GLOBAL. In addition to American universities that now make their course content available, universities all over the world follow suit. But just as importantly, learners all over the world have access to this content. Statistics from MIT’s program show that less than 1% of those who access the university’s content are actually doing so from MIT. And almost 60% of those visitors to the site are outside the U.S.
3. DEMOCRATIZING HIGH-QUALITY EDUCATION. The idea of making content available online means that the sorts of information that are part of a university education can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. Despite the hoops and hurdles necessary for gaining admission to a school like MIT, the course content is actually accessible to anyone.
4. ALLOWING CUSTOMIZATION. MIT OCW is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-Non-Commercial License. That means that teachers and learners are able to share and remix the content that’s available.
5. ENCOURAGING SHARING. Do educators have an ethical responsibility to share? Open CourseWare reminds us that a large part of our role as educators is to share knowledge, and we should work to remove the barriers that make that possible.
6. EMPOWERING EDUCATORS. Even with the best of intentions, sharing content isn’t possible without the framework in place to make that happen. Open CourseWare efforts give educators the tools necessary to spread their teaching materials globally.
7. PROVIDING VALUABLE CONTENT. Want to learn about a particular topic? Want to see what the professors at the premier institutions in the world include in a class on astrophysics, calculus, engineering? Open CourseWare means that learners are able to follow their intellectual pursuits, without having to worry about college applications, tuition, course requirements, and the like.
8. ENABLING LIFELONG LEARNING. Most of those who take advantage of Open CourseWare aren’t enrolled in college. These are independent learners who are not working towards a particular degree, but are committed to lifelong learning.
9. REINFORCING THE COLLEGE EXPERIENCE. Open CourseWare doesn’t negate the college degree necessarily. But it does show that universities can post their content online with the assurance that the college campus experience is, in fact, worth paying for. That you can access MIT course content online has done nothing at all to diminish the value of an MIT degree.
10. DEMONSTRATING THE NEED FOR MORE. Despite the massive amount of content that’s available online, it isn’t really enough. In the past ten years, we’ve seen a number of other efforts grow up alongside open courseware, aiming to establish a community of learners who are all working through these same topics — whether they’re students or independent learners. Examples include OpenStudy, a project that grew out of Georgia Tech and Emory University and now runs a social learning network that supports Open CourseWare and open educational resources. Learning isn’t a solitary act.