OpenCourseWare And OER After A Decade

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

The OCW Consortium celebrated 10 years of OpenCourseWare (OCW). If you're not familiar with the movement, it is focused mostly on making university-level content freely and openly available online. The faculty at MIT kicked it off when they agreed to put materials from all 2,000 of the university’s courses on the Web.

MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch this movement and that is very important. But much of what is online is content that is "Web 1.0.” Syllabi, exercises, quizzes and the occasional presentation and video are the typical resources.

Resources that are not from academia, such as Khan Academy and Wikipedia, are also in the spirit of open educational resources (OER).

Here are some OER or OCW resources that you should investigate if you haven't already.


  1. P2PU The Peer 2 Peer University - grassroots open education project with volunteers facilitating courses where learners are in charge. Courses use open content and the open social web and are a great model of lifelong learning.

  2. OpenStudy is a social learning network - independent learners and traditional students meet in a massively-multiplayer study group. It supports study groups and includes groups that focus on MIT OCW courses.

  3. NITXY a learning management platform that supports open education resources.

  4. iUniv a Japanese startup building web and mobile apps, using social video and audio that can be shared to Twitter, Facebook, and Evernote et al.

  5. OCWSearch is a search engine dedicated to finding OCW content - it seems to have stalled somewhat but it does index ten universities’ OCW content, including
    MIT, Notre Dame, and The Open University UK.

  6. Smarthistory a free and open multimedia website -  it might replace the somewhat obsolete traditional art history textbook.

  7. CK-12 Foundation’s Flexbook platform provides free, collaboratively-built and openly-licensed digital textbooks for K-12.

  8. Flat World Knowledge interesting college textbook publisher model where books are published under an open license - customize the books, edit, add to, mix-up, use as-is, access the books online for free or can pay for print-on-demand and audiobook versions.

  9. Connextions is one of several large repositories of educational content - 17,000+ openly licensed learning modules

  10. collegeopentextbooks.org can lead you to the other repositories and help you network with other like-minded educators




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