Open Content

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a leading proponent of OCW, with a mission “to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware”. As defined by the Consortium’s Web site, OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses that is available for use and adaptation under an open license and does not typically provide certification or access to instructors. This enables millions of people to gain quick and easy access to the complete materials of university courses: syllabus, readings, lecture notes, assignments, exam study questions, related resources, etc. From a MIT course on Generative Linguistics to and course on Advanced Electromagnetic Waves from Tokyo Institute of Technology or a course on Strategic Environmental Assessment resulting from the collaboration of Oxford Brookes University with the United Nations University (UNU), an impressive universe of knowledge is waiting to be discovered! Although the great majority of the materials are in English, many courses are now available in Spanish  and Portuguese thanks to the collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Universia (both members of the Consortium).

Open Licenses and Creative Commons

Open content is protected by a number of different intellectual property licenses designed to facilitate the open use of open content materials. The Creative Commons licenses, inspired by the free software’s philosophy and currently used worldwide, were described by Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons project and law professor at Stanford University law, as the “legal tools to further enable the collaborative process in education, and elsewhere, that the technical tools of the Internet now beg us to advance.” Creative Commons has officially joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium as an affiliate member. Read more about Creative Commons licenses in the organization’s Web page and find out how they have been adopted by Latin American countries by reading an ifPeople article available in Spanish.

Open Source Software: eduCommons and OCW

The early pioneers of OpenCourseWare projects had to create their own technology for managing the initiative. As a result, initial sites tend to use a commercial content management systems that is not accessible to others. However, thanks to funding from the Hewlett Foundation, an Open Source, Plone-based system now offers easy access for additional universities to create an innovative OCW site. Designed by the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) Research Group at Utah State University,  this system, called EduCommons is based on the leading Open Source content management system called Plone.

This OpenCourseWare management system currently powers the Utah State University OpenCourseWare, is built around a workflow that guides users through the process of publishing materials in an openly accessible format. This includes uploading materials into a repository, dealing with copyright, reassembling materials into courses, providing quality assurance, and publication of materials. Read more about this system and learn to use it for your own OCW project. The recently released 2.1.0 version can be downloaded from SourceForge.net. ifPeople, which develops custom software with Plone, can support universities in their use of eduCommons. Contact us for more details.