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Open Courseware (OCW) or Open Educational Resources (OER)There is a growing movement in higher education to create course materials that are available for use without restrictions of copyright or use fees. This movement often refers to materials developed in this way as 'open courseware' or 'open educational resources (OER).'
The Foothill-De Anza Community College District has a Board Policy (will download a PDF file) encouraging faculty to make use of open courseware in their classes.
One
of the biggest challenges to wider use of open courseware is the relative
difficulty faculty may have in finding quality materials. Here is a list of places that are maintaining open courseware and making it available to anyone who wants to use it:
- M.I.T. OpenCourseWare (OCW) Initiative
- Utah State OCW
- Tufts University OCW
- Carnegie-Mellon Open Learning Initiative
- Foothill-De Anza Community College District Sofia Project
- Apple's iTunes U has course material from about two dozen colleges and universities, including MIT, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Duke and others (you must have iTunes on your computer to access). Not everything there is courseware (it also often has announcements from the alumni offices, the athletic departments, or other non-academic functions within an institution), but you may be able to find what you want if you are determined (it's organized by institution, not subject area; and then within each institution it is often by department or discipline).
- The OERCommons, sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation, is an effort to increase the amount of OER available by providing "a single point of access through
which educators, students, and all learners can search,
browse, evaluate, download, and discuss open educational
resources (OER) that are freely available online." (as stated on their web site's "About" page). It has a very large list of courses that provide OER materials, perhaps the largest I've found yet.
- An online catalog of open courseware has been developed and made available by a variety of higher ed institutions who support open courseware. The catalog attempts to provide a mechanism for faculty to locate materials within their discipline.
Foothill - De Anza is currently supporting a wiki site about OER for community colleges. You can see it start up and grow at the CCCOER web site. Stay tuned for more information and feel free to contribute to it.
The De Anza Library is maintaining a weblog that has information about OER. Its value is that because it is a blog it has current news and information about OER readily available.
Our sibling college, Foothill, is maintaining a web site for Open Educational Resources. Check it out (although you'll need to create an account to log in!. There's one page there that contains an outline of a brief talk I gave at a meeting on June 28, 2007, with the College of the Canyons about the challenges and opportunities of OER. If you prefer, here's a PDF of the OER Presentation.
The Hewlett Foundation, which has been a major financial supporter of Open Courseware and Open Educational Resources has a blog about OER, cleverly called OERderves (say it out loud!), that is updated frequently with OER news. It's definitely worth a look periodically. (You can also subscribe to its RSS feed, which would be a lot easier than going to the site every so often!)
Also, check out my FAQ about OER and opening up your intellectual property for others to use. Become famous and let others use your work!
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