Serendipity35

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) launched a site that gives educators and learners access to classroom materials at no cost.

It's called OER (for Open Educational Resources) Commons at oercommons.org. There are a range of educational resources: primary documents, complete course guides and syllabi, lectures, lesson plans, lab activities, and homework assignments on a variety of topics.

The site has a good number of 2.0 features like user ability to add tags, ratings, reviews, and comments to help others find their way through the 8000+ resources now listed. So it is content with some social net mixed in too.

The site is really an aggregating site for materials. You'll see a lot of MIT's OpenCourseware materials indexed here as well as material developed by faculty at Rice, Harvard, and the University of California-Berkeley.

But you should not see this material as limited to higher ed, but as source for the K-20 community in areas like art, mathematics, science and technology. There are links for Primary, Secondary, Post-secondary.

Don't expect to find a primary "course" though - most links from that area led to animations & video clips from sources like PBS' NOVA program. It was annoying that, even though I had registered at OER, I needed to register at another site to view a sample animation that was supplied by teachersdomain.org.

I clicked on "humanities" and got 1495 hits with all kinds of things from Visual Histories: German Cinema 1945 To Present, Fall 2003, to Education For The New Millennium and Out Of Ground Zero: Catastrophe And Memory, Fall 2005.