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[edit] International consortia

TESSA - Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa
TESSA is a research and development initiative creating OER and course design guidance for teachers and teacher educators working in Sub-Saharan African countries. TESSA has produced a large bank of materials aimed at improving access to, and the quality of, local school-based education and training for teachers. These materials (including audio and other media) are modular in format. They focus on classroom practice in the key areas of literacy, numeracy, science, social studies and the arts and life skills. All materials are available through the website in a variety of different formats and languages.
TESSA is a consortium of 18 national and international organisations. It includes 13 institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa who are using the TESSA materials in a variety of teacher education programmes.
Scope: modules in 5 areas, available in a pan-African version and in localised country versions for Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

[edit] National initiatives

Repository.ac.nz - the New Zealand OER Project
The objective of the project is to develop courseware that will be freely available to for all tertiary education institutions in New Zealand. On the basis of a successful pilot, a further output of the project is to develop a model to initiate future projects for the benefit of the education sector at a system-wide level. All courseware is being developed for openness. The content is being developed with high levels of granualarity, packaged with appropriate standards, and with content and presentation separated where possible.
The project is funded by the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission’s Innovation Development Fund.
Scope: initially 3 ICT courses, 5 business courses, 3 building and construction courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic
To find out more about this initiative read the New Zealand OER Project story
The Thutong Portal
The Thutong Portal: Delivering information, curriculum, and support materials to the South African schooling and FET College community.
Copyright/licensing: mostly Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5

[edit] Subject-specific national initiatives

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)
Launched in September 2006, NPTEL is a joint venture of seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, funded by the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development. The main objective of the programme is to enhance the quality of engineering education in India by developing curriculum-based video and web courses at all levels of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching - learning materials, digitally taped classroom lectures, supplementary materials and links to research materials. Message boards are also available for each course.
Scope: 118 courses in 6 areas of engineering
Copyright/licensing: copyright
Restrictions: use of the site is not restricted, but all new users must first register in order to access the materials
Free High School Science Texts
FHSST (Free High School Science Texts) is a project that aims to provide free science and mathematics textbooks for Grades 10 to 12 science learners in South Africa.
Scope: physics, chemistry and mathematics textbooks for South Africa's grades 10, 11 and 12
Copyright/licensing: all content GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

[edit] Institutional initiatives

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI)
A collection of "cognitively informed", openly available and free online courses and course materials that enact instruction for an entire course. The project adds to online education the crucial elements of instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence. A primary objective is to build a community of use that will play an important role in ongoing course development. The courses are developed in a modular fashion to allow faculty at a variety of institutions to deliver the courses as designed, or to modify the content and sequence to fit their needs.
Scope: 11 courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Open.Michigan
Open.Michigan is a collection of open initiatives and projects at the University of Michigan (U-M). Open.Michigan supports the open access and use of U-M resources for teaching, learning, and research. Open.Michigan promotes open content licensing and supports the reuse, redistribution, and remixing of educational materials for use by others worldwide. Some of the key efforts underway under the Open.Michigan umbrella include U-M’s Open Educational Resources publishing activities, development of software tools that support creating open content, and various open content repositories.
Scope: 30 full courses plus access to collections, self-contained learning modules, and other educational resources.
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
OpenER, Open University of the Netherlands
A project to offer short courses at the Higher Education level, with the objective of attracting learners into formal higher education.
Scope: 24 courses in 7 subject areas in Dutch
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Generic
To find out more about this initiative read the OpenER story
OpenLearn, The Open University
A project to make a selection of the UK Open University's learning materials available free of charge to educators and learners around the world. The OpenLearn web site was launched in October 2006. The Open University has drawn on its experience in supported open learning to provide an environment that contains high quality learning materials, together with a range of learning support and informal community building tools, including online discussion forums. The site has two parts:
1. LearningSpace: Provides a first selection of Open University learning materials that are freely available for learners to use for their own study, away from any formal teaching environment. Learning materials cover academic subjects, professional development and study skills development.
2. LabSpace: Described as "the experimental zone for OpenLearn", LabSpace is designed as a community-led site, primarily for educators, providing a range of online tools to foster the concept of sharing and re-use of materials.
Scope: 19 units in 11 topics
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license
To find out more about this initiative read the OpenLearn OER story
Open Yale Courses
Free and open access to seven introductory undergraduate Yale courses. Each course includes a full set of video lectures, plus other course materials such as syllabi, suggested readings and problem sets. The lectures are available to download in video or in audio-only version. Searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.
It is intended to add around 30 more courses to the site over the next three years, covering the full range of arts and humanities, social science and natural science disciplines.
Scope: 7 courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license
PE'ER, Open University of Israel (OUI)
PE’ER Project - a Hebrew word meaning "splendor" and also a Hebrew acronym for "Opening the Treasures of the Mind".
In PE’ER the OUI offers Hebrew-readers free access to academic educational resources:
Tens of academic textbooks in a full electronic format (e-books), some of them in audio format free for download or as streaming media (audio-books), video lectures and recorded tutorials, and a variety of study materials including lesson plans, presentations, interactive exercises, multiple-choice questions, glossaries, and other learning aids.
The PE’ER web site was launched in May 2008.
Scope:110 e-books in 36 courses, 6,100 learning objects from 130 courses in 9 subject areas in Hebrew
Copyright/licensing: Some books are under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Israel License
Sofia Open Content Initiative
An open content publishing initiative launched by the Foothill - De Anza Community College District, which promotes faculty and institutional sharing of community college-level course materials. Faculty from community colleges and four-year universities who have developed exemplary course materials, and are willing to share it openly with others, are encouraged to contribute content to Sofia.
Scope: 8 courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license
University of the Western Cape Free Courseware Project
The South African University of the Western Cape is the only African member of the Open Courseware Consortium and started publishing courses in 2007. In addition to the institutional courseware publication, UWC also hosts the Rip-Mix-Learn research group to look at open practices in teaching and learning [1], and the Rip-Mix-Learners student publishing project.
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license
To find out more about this initiative read the Free Courseware Project story

[edit] Subject-specific institutional initiatives

ADUni.org
Website of the alumni of ArsDigita University (ADU), a one-year, intensive post-baccalaureate program in Computer Science based on the undergraduate course of study at MIT. The programme was forced to shut down in 2001, but the course materials are available on the site for free use.
Scope: 13 computer science courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license
Berklee Shares
An electronic publishing initiative of Berklee College of Music. Berklee Shares' goal is to provide free access to faculty-authored Berklee music lessons designed for musicians, music students and music educators. The Berkleeshares.com web site is a library of free music lessons that are available for downloading, listening, viewing or reading.
Scope: music lessons for 5 topics and 8 instruments
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 1.0 Generic
PhET (Physics Education Technology)
A suite of Java or Flash simulations for teaching and learning physics from the Physics Education Technology project of the University of Colorado. The simulations are animated, interactive and game-like environments in which students learn through exploration. They emphasise the connections between real life phenomena and the underlying science and seek to make the visual and conceptual models of expert physicists accessible to students. Findings from prior research and student testing are incorporated into the design. The simulations run directly from the website. Users can also download and install the entire website on to any local machine for use offline. A guide details how the simulations can be best used to support both in-class teaching and individual learning. Simulations are also available in Spanish.
Scope: 49 simulations for physics
Teaching Copyright
A course from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help teachers present the laws surrounding digital rights in a balanced way. The curriculum is designed to give teachers a comprehensive set of tools to educate students about copyright while incorporating activities that exercise a variety of learning skills. Lesson topics include: the history of copyright law; the relationship between copyright and innovation; fair use and its relationship to remix culture; peer-to-peer file sharing; and the interests of the stakeholders that ultimately affect how copyright is interpreted by copyright owners, consumers, courts, lawmakers and technology innovators. The lesson plan concludes with a mock trial that tests the students' understanding of copyright and its limitations and encourages them to consider the positions of each party involved.
Scope: One curriculum on copyright - comprises five (60 minute) lessons, plus course handouts and supporting documents
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States
Virtual Courseware Project
A project of the US National Science Foundation and California State University to create interactive, online simulations for the life science laboratory or for earth science field studies. The activities are designed to enhance an existing curriculum and include online assessments. They can be used by school and college level students.
Scope: 18 labs and simulations for the life and earth sciences
Copyright/licensing: copyright Virtual Courseware Project, all rights reserved

[edit] Open courseware initiatives

CORE Open Courseware
CORE (China Open Resources for Education) began its involvement in the OER movement by translating English-language resources (notably MIT OCW) into Chinese. It now also translates high quality Chinese resources from its member universities into English.
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license
Fulbright Economics Teaching Program OpenCourseWare
Fulbright Economics Teaching Program OCW will provide access to course materials (syllibi, lecture notes, reading lists, problem sets etc.) in English and Vietnamese for all FETP courses. FETP is a partnership of the University of Economics, Ho Chi Minh City and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. FETP is regarded as Vietnam’s leading public policy teaching centre. Its programmes incorporate economics, management, technology and law.
Scope: 37 economics courses
Copyright/licensing: custom Creative Commons FETP license (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike with some exceptions)
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health OpenCourseWare
JHSPH OCW provides access to course materials (syllibi, lecture notes, reading lists etc.) for Johns Hopkins' most popular courses. Courses are also being translated into simplified and traditional Chinese by OOPS.
Scope: 17 public health courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license
Keio University Open Courseware
A member of the Japan OCW Alliance, Keio Open Courseware is openly available educational content from Keio University’s courses, including syllabi and lecture notes, in both English and Japanese.
Scope: 12 courses
Copyright/licensing: copyright Keio University
Klagenfurt OpenCourseWare
Inspired by MIT, and as part of a strategic eLearning initiative, Klagenfurt University supports the publication of course materials as a means to increase internal communication, external visibility and the active participation of its staff and students in the world wide web.
Scope: courses in 10 different subject areas in German
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Austria
To find out more about this initiative read the Klagenfurt OCW story
Kyoto-U OpenCourseWare
A member of the Japan OCW Alliance, Kyoto University OCW is a free and open publication of course materials in both Japanese and English. The goal of the OCW@KU Project is to transmit educational information from Kyoto University to the rest of the world, and through this, contribute to the improvement of educational environments not only in Japan but also throughout the world. Kyoto-U aims to provide support to universities, particularly those in Japan, starting up similar projects.
Scope: 44 courses
Copyright/licensing: copyright Kyoto University
MIT OpenCourseWare
The first OpenCourseWare initiative. MIT OCW is a free and open website offering high quality teaching and learning materials, organized as courses, and created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty for their own classroom teaching. For any given course, the materials convey the parameters of the course’s subject matter and pedagogy, ideally representing a substantially complete set of all the materials used in the course. Some courses also have video lectures. The OCW initiative has two goals:
1. provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world;
2. extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware" concept.
Mirror sites make MIT OCW available to users in Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese.
Scope: 1,400 courses
Copyright/licensing: custom Creative Commons MIT OCW license (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike with some exceptions)
Open.Michigan's Open Educational Resources Initiative
Open.Michigan is a collection of open initiatives and projects at the University of Michigan (U-M). A major component of Open.Michigan is the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative, which supports and promotes the creation of OER and publishes those resources on U-M’s OER website. Current participants include the Medical School, School of Information, School of Dentistry, College of Engineering, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, School of Nursing, School of Public Health, School of Education, and College of Literature, Science and the Arts.
Scope: 30 full courses plus access to collections, self-contained learning modules, and other educational resources.
Copyright/licensing: Uses a variety of Creative Commons licenses, selected by each individual instructor.
Osaka University Open Courseware
A member of the Japan OCW Alliance, Osaka Open Courseware is a collection of Osaka University's educational materials used in the courses taught at the University. Courses available reflect the University's bias towards the sciences and are available in Japanese and English.
Scope: 30 science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses
Copyright/licensing: copyright Osaka University
ParisTech OpenCourseWare
A collection of teaching and learning materials, created by the faculty of the 11 French engineering schools that make up the ParisTech consortium, and used for their own classroom teaching. The research and teaching at the 11 institutions is complementary and cover virtually all sectors of the various engineering sciences. Course materials are mainly in French, although the site interface is also available in English and Spanish.
Scope: 1,152 resources, mainly for engineering
Copyright/licensing: no notice
Rai CourseWare
A collection of educational materials used in the courses taught at the 21 Indian campuses of the Rai Foundation.
Scope: 58 courses
Copyright/licensing: no notice; the site asks that educational institutions wishing to use Rai CourseWare for their students publish an acknowledgement to Rai Foundation Colleges as "source"
Tokyo Tech Open Course Ware
A member of the Japan OCW Alliance, Tokyo Tech OCW is a platform maintained by Tokyo Institute of Technology for providing free access to course materials in English and Japanese for users around the world. The initiative aims to release Tokyo Tech's high-level science and technology educational resources as the world's public property.
Scope: courses in 58 science, technology and engineering subjects
Copyright/licensing: copyright Tokyo Institute of Technology
Tufts University OpenCourseWare
Tufts OCW provides access to course materials, including syllibi, lecture notes and reading lists. The initial offering relects the University's strength in the life sciences, and demonstrates a multidisciplinary approach and international perspective.
Scope: 15 courses, with a particular bias towards life sciences
Copyright/licensing: custom Creative Commons Tufts OCW license (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike with some exceptions)
United Nations University OpenCourseWare
Showcases the training and educational programmes implemented by UNU in a wide range of areas relevant to the work of the United Nations. Courses are available from the following UNU research and training centres:
1. International Institute for Software Technology;
2. International Network on Water, Environment and Health;
3. Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology.
Scope: 14 courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike, unless otherwise stated
U-Now - University of Nottingham open courseware
U-Now acts as a window onto the University of Nottingham's activities. It aims to increase learning opportunities for those who are unable to undertake formal qualifications and to contribute to the advancement of pedagogy across the academic community.
Resources are drawn from across the range of degree programmes offered and showcase a range of teaching and learning activities.
Scope: 87 learning resources
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license
University of Southern Queensland OpenCourseWare
A sample offering of 10 distance education courses from each of the five faculties of the university, including three courses from its Tertiary Preparation Program. The courses are published in either ICE (Integrated Content Environment), an open source content management system developed by USQ, HTML or GOOD (Generic Online Offline Delivery), an earlier publishing application developed by USQ.
Scope: 10 courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license
University of Tokyo OpenCourseWare
A member of the Japan OCW Alliance, University of Tokyo OCW is a free and open publication of course calendars, syllabi, educational notes and texts, in both Japanese and English. UT OCW plans to add 10 new courses every year.
Scope: 13 courses
Copyright/licensing: custom open licence, similar to Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike, although with some restricted materials
Utah State University OpenCourseWare
A free and open educational resource offering high quality materials that are used in the teaching of undergraduate and graduate subjects at USU. Materials are available on the Internet, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. The initial offering has focused on content that enables users to build local capacity in key areas, including irrigation engineering, instructional design and agriculture. The initiative also aims to catalyze the growth of communities of learners around USU's OpenCourseWare.
Scope: 23 courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license
Waseda University OpenCourseWare
A member of the Japan OCW Alliance, Waseda OCW is a collection of Osaka University's educational materials, in both Japanese and English, used in the courses taught at the University. Users can also access the archives of the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum and that of Aizu Museum.
Scope: 14 computer science and asian studies courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons license

[edit] Videos and podcasts

Berkeley on iTunes U and webcast.berkeley
The University of California at Berkeley has maintained a public podcasting site for several years (webcast.berkeley). Lectures will now also be available on iTunes. Users can download lectures individually to subscribe to a semester of podcasts. Berkeley is the first university to distribute all materials through iTunes to the general public, rather than restricting them to students and alumni.
Scope: 38 webcasts and podcasts on webcast.berkeley from the Spring 2006 semester, with archived material going back to Fall 2001; lectures from almost 30 courses on iTunes
Berkeley YouTube channel
Launched in October 2007, UC Berkeley's YouTube channel contains videos of lectures, events and information about campus life.
Scope: over 200 course videos
Stanford on iTunes
Free access to a wide range of Stanford-related digital audio content via the iTunes Music Store. The project includes two sites:
1. a public site, which includes Stanford faculty lectures, learning materials, music, sports reports etc.
2. a restricted-access site for Stanford students, delivering course materials and support content.
Restrictions: course content generally restricted to Stanford community
University of Arizona Searchable Video Library (SVL)
Designed to increase accessibility of course content for University of Arizona staff and students, this web site is also available to the general public. The SVL provides access to video presentations and taped class lectures. Videos are transcribed by state-of-the-art voice recognition or closed-captioning so that the spoken text of the presentation can also be searched.
Scope: 41 courses
Copyright/licensing: copyight University of Arizona
Restrictions: some courses password protected at request of instructor
University of Southern California YouTube channel
Launched in October 2007, a couple of weeks after UC Berkeley's channel, USC's channel includes videos of course lectures and campus events. YouTube users can choose to subscribe to the full USC channel, or sub-channels from individual schools.
Scope: over 200 videos

[edit] Community development projects (open development and publishing platforms)

Connexions
The Connexions project at Rice University has created an open environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Connexions hosts a "Content Commons" of electronic course material divided into small "knowledge chunks" – modules – that connect into larger courses. Anyone is free to contribute materials, or take existing materials, adapt them to their needs and contribute them back to the Content Commons. Materials exist in English, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai.
Scope: 2,700 modules and 115 courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution license
To find out more about this initiative read the Connexions OER story
Curriki
A collection of free lessons, assessments, resources and textbooks for grades K-12. The resources have all been developed by members of the 20,000-strong Curriki community. In the near future members will be able to comment on and edit the materials. For now, Curriki staff and volunteers are reviewing all of the contributed materials.
Curriki was launched in January 2006 and is the result of work done for GELC - the Global Education and Learning Community - an online project started by Sun Microsystems to develop works for education in a collaborative effort.
Scope: 542 resources
Copyright/licensing: uploaded materials are assigned the Creative Commons Attribution license by default, although creators can opt out and select a different licence
DIDASknol
DIDASCA - the first Italian cyber school for lifelong learning – has launched a national digital textbook project. DIDASknol is a digital textbook written by teachers, in co-operation with their students. DIDASknol is based on Google Knols - education knowledge units that can be rated, commented on and edited by users. Anyone is free to take existing DIDASknols, adapt them to their needs and contribute them back.
Scope: 1,533 knols(?) in Italian
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
EOE (Educational Object Economy)
A community of educators, developers and businesses working together to use, create and collaborate on educational Java objects on the web. Includes a library of Java applets, sorted by subject.
Scope: 3,312 Java applets
Free Curricula Center
Aims to be a focal point for the development and sharing of textbooks, instructor guides and other educational materials. The Center helps its participants work together to create materials for the subjects in which they have expertise. They do this by providing online tools to help educators collaborate successfully and by providing a space on the Internet where students can have free access to their finished products. FCC works on a system of academic subject committees, made up of subject-specialist volunteers. A committee may write a textbook chapter by chapter, after first devising a table of contents. Alternatively it may take a classic work in the subject that has entered the public domain, format and annotate it to produce a "Twenty-First Century Revision" of the work.
Scope: 7 textbooks (mathematics, philosophy and physics)
Copyright/licensing: public domain or open license
The Global Text Project
The Global Text Project seeks to solve the problem of the high cost of textbooks for students in developing countries with a new model that will create a free library of 1000 electronic texts on the Internet. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, DVD, or eBook.
Global Text engages the collective intelligence of academics and practitioners in writing open content textbooks, under editorial control, and a Creative Commons license. Books can be tailored for the needs of individual countries. They will be continually updated by their creators and, importantly, by the community of academics and students that use them.
As of August, 2007, the project is in the proof of concept stage with two books: Information Systems and Business Fundamentals. Books are being written in English and will be translated initially into Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish. Contributed books in Spanish and Arabic will be available soon.
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
LeMill - Learning Mill
LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. First at all, you can find learning resources. The stuff you find you can use in your own teaching or learning. You may also add your own learning content to LeMill. You may edit your content and combine out of the media pieces some larger junks of learning materials. If you wish you might also join one of the groups producing or editing some learning content. In LeMill the content is always easily found where and when ever you need them. Anyone may also start their own LeMill website. You can download LeMill engine, install it on your own server and put it online. After this you will automatically be part of the global network of LeMill servers. Because of this, LeMill is also "do it yourself" learning resource website engine.
Open of Course
Multilingual portal for free and open content courses and tutorials, created by two Dutch companies, Mingos and Freelancenetwerk. The focus is on creating and publishing lifeskills and career development courses, rather than purely academic subjects. At the moment, most courses are for computing or language skills. Courses and tutorials are accessible without the need for permenant internet access.
The project is currently seeking course content developers, translators and coordinators for each language section of the portal.
Scope: 8 multilingual courses/tutorials, 23 English-language courses/tutorials, 1 Dutch course/tutorial
Copyright/licensing GNU/GPL or Creative Commons license
Qedoc
Qedoc specialises in interactive open educational resources. It provides software tools for the creation and playback of resources, and for the conversion of resources into formats which other systems (such as Moodle) can use. It also hosts a MediaWiki-driven repository of open educational resources created with Qedoc tools. The repository also allows for community discussion of use and development of new resources.
Scope: 350 interactive resources
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons licences
To find out more about this initiative read the Qedoc OER story
WikiEducator
WikiEducator is a free community resource supported by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) for the development of free educational content. WikiEducator is used for:
1. planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;
2. development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;
3. work on building Open Educational Resources (OER) on how to create OER.
4. networking on funding proposals developed as free content.
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license
To find out more about this initiative read the WikiEducator story
Wikiversity
A wiki-based learning community for the creation and use of open content learning materials, courses and textbooks. Wikiversity is currently hosted by Wikibooks, although a formal proposal has been submitted to make it an independent project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The ultimate aim is to build an electronic institution of learning that will be used to test the limits of the wiki model for developing electronic learning resources, for teaching, and for conducting research and publishing results. Wikiversity has portals in 17 different languages.
Scope: courses in 10 different "schools"
Copyright/licensing: GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

[edit] Subject-specific community development projects

e-LEE (e-Learning Tools for Electrical Engineering)
A project of the European Community SOCRATES programme, the Association for the Promotion of e-Learning Tools for Electrical Engineering aims to develop, disseminate and evalute multimedia learning tools for engineering teaching, especially electrical engineering. The Association currently has four institutional members, in Belgium, France, Portugal and Romania. Materials are consequently available in French, Portuguese and Romanian, as well as English.
4 electrical engineering tutorials, Copyright e-lee.net
Harvey Project
Launched in July 1998 with the goal of empowering individual faculty to create their own physiology courses, using high-quality, peer-reviewed, highly interactive learning objects. The project is an international collaboration of educators, researchers, physicians, students, programmers, instructional designers and graphic artists, and is hosted by Wayne State University.
Scope: 12 physiology learning objects
Copyright/licensing: custom open license similar to the GNU Public License (GPL)

[edit] Individual initiatives

Free-Ed
Founded in 1997 by David L. Heiserman to provide free, quality course materials over the Internet for a global audience of self learners, covering areas of professional need, as well as critical academic areas. Courses are built from materials that are readily available elsewhere on the Web as open content.
Scope: approx 100 courses
Copyright/licensing: copyright Free-Ed.Net, all rights reserved
Light and Matter physics and astronomy resources
Created by Benjamin Crowell, physics and astronomy professor at Fullerton College in southern California, the site offers a series of introductory physics textbooks, free to download, some astronomy learning objects, and some course materials for Dr Crowell's astronomy and physics own courses. Some resources have partial French translations.
Scope: 8 physics textbooks, 3 astronomy learning objects and materials from 5 physics and astronomy courses
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license
Managing the Digital Enterprise
An educational site created by Michael Rappa, Professor of Technology Management and Director of the Open Courseware Laboratory in the College of Management at North Carolina State University. The site surveys the many opportunities and challenges managers face in an increasingly digital world, and is open to students and instructors alike. The site is divided into fifteen discussion topics, or “modules”. Each module has the same basic structure: a description of the topic that highlights the issues at hand, plus several sub-sections with links to a variety of educational resources. The modules are updated continuously throughout the year, with new resources added. The site contains over 120 web pages and over 1,200 external links to openly available resources on the Internet.
Scope: 1 course on technology management
Copyright/licensing: copyright Michael Rappa
The OpenFiction Project
An opencourseware resource for teaching and learning the art of fiction writing. The OpenFiction Project was created by Stephen Carson and contains the materials that he developed for a distance learning introductory fiction class, originally offered through Emerson College's continuing education programme. (Stephen Carson now works on the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative.) Course materials are available on the site or for download (as a zip file of the live contents or as a PDF). There is also an online forum to support users.
Scope: 1 course on creative writing
Copyright/licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license
PEOI (Professional Education Organization International)
Created by John Petroff, a retired economics professor, PEOI is a volunteer-based project that aims to provide online course content for professional university-level education to improve the skills of aspiring professionals. Anyone can use PEOI course content free of charge. PEOI also offers a range of services such as testing, grading, grade maintenance and attestation of course completion, for a fee to cover costs. Content is available in a range of languages, including English, French, Spanish, Russian, German and Arabic.
Scope: 7 completed courses (not all available in all languages)
Copyright/licensing: custom open licence - Education Material Universal Common License


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