OER/OCW




STARTING POINTS
But before we get bogged down by tons of free learning repositories, here are few good starting points to find and know more about OER and OCW:

SEARCH
  • Einztein
    Find free online courses. Connect your favorite courses to relevant learning resources. Exchange knowledge and information with other members whose academic interests match yours. Join peers and professors in exploring the newest academic frontier: free online courses.
  • Virtual Professors
    Delivers interesting Free College Online Courses to you each day. They are handpicked from some of the most interesting free online college courses from the best universities and seminars held from around the world. In addition, you’ll find a handy directory to universities which have free college online courses.
  • Academic Earth
    An educational video website with the goal of enhancing the usability and expanding the awareness of OER, focusing first on video lectures.
  • YouTube EDU
    YouTube has aggregated all of the videos from its college and university partners - including luminaries like Stanford, Harvard, and Dartmouth - in one place.
  • OCW/OER Search
    This Google customed search engine enables you to search the sites that are linked from this post (with a few filters, too). Click here to view Tony Hirst's (Credit to him for the super idea!) OER/OCW search version, which also searches sites linked on this post. Click here to view Scott Leslie's upgraded version, which brings it to a Do-It-Together level by using a Wiki enabling anyone to add OER/OCW links (URLs).
  • OpenCourseWare Finder
    The OCW Finder currently shows results from several collections, including MIT OCW , Utah State University, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health OCW, Tufts University OCW, Foothill De-Anza SOFIA, and Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative.
  • OER Recommender
    Makes it easy for open education resource providers to provide links to related resources. A good starting point to search and find relevant OER resources.
  • Folksemantic
    Browse and search over 110,000 Open Education Resources (OERs). "This is an open educational resource recommender. There's also a website widget and a Firefox extension. The system basically provides access to NSDL resources, but also Johns Hopkins, MERLOT and MIT-OCW resources. OER Recommender now has real-time analysis of OER resources related to other web pages (eg. Amazon). It's all free and open source, and the code is available" - Stephen Downes
  • OER Commons
    A global teaching and learning network of free-to-use resources – from K-12 lesson plans to college courseware – for you to use, tag, rate, and review.
  • Open Courseware Directory
    You will find 7 groups of subject-specific open courseware, including specialized resources for each subject. It is an annotated listing of publicly available courseware (lecture notes, handouts, slides, tutorial material, exam questions, quizzes, videos, demonstrations, etc) from the world's universities, colleges and other educational institutions
  • OpenCourseWare Consortium
    The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.
  • Free Online Courses
    It includes thousands of links to courses in subjects ranging from architecture to chemistry to women’s studies and these courses are prepared by top institutions such as MIT, Yale University and University of California.

COMMUNITIES
  • WikiEducator
    An evolving community intended for the collaborative planning of education projects linked with the development of OER. development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning; work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs.
  • Wikiversity
    Wikibooks, Collection of open-content textbooks. Wikiversity is intended for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.
  • UNESCO OER Community
    This site was originally created by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) as a place where members of the UNESCO OER Community can work together on questions, issues and documents. There are some wonderful resources here providing you with relevant information needed to understand what OER is about, how to use/contribute/collaborate, and how to move forward (e.g. OER: the Way Forward , OER stories, OER presentations and UNESCO OER Toolkit)

NEWS
  • OER Blogs
    An initiative from MIT's OpenCourseWare project to aggregate and stimulate discussion about open educational resources. It is a great resource to keep yourself updated about the latest trends and developments in OCW and OER.
  • Open Education News
    A number of individuals from the US, South Africa, and eventually other locations daily monitor the internet for news related to open education. It is essentially a group blog.
  • Open Education - Free Education For All
    This site led by Thomas J. Hanson is dedicated to tracking the changes occurring in education today.
  • EduResources Weblog
    This weblog by Joseph Hart focuses on locating, evaluating, discussing, and providing guidelines to instructional resources for faculty and students in higher education (HE). The emphasis is on free, shared, HE resources.

AMAZING COLLECTIONS!Why start bookmarking free learning content out there from scratch, when there are great people out there that have already assembled amazing OCW collections for us to explore (for free!). Here are a few amazing OCW collections shared by special people out there:


UNIVERSITY LEARNING & OCW
The OCW or University related learning content compilation below is organized according to Country, University and my urge to quick access. Not much metadata here about each University or repository, except quick access to the juicy links. Hopefully, it makes 'repository finding sense' to you. This compilation was influenced by this great list! Yes, some parts were even copy/paste! :)


NORTH AMERICA
Other OCW:
Other YouTube Channels:
Other Podcast Libraries:


EUROPE
UNITED KINGDOM
FRANCE
HOLLAND
SPAIN
SWITZERLAND
TURKEY

ASIA
AUSTRALIA
NEW ZEALAND
SAUDI ARABIA
JAPAN
INDIA
KOREA
TAIWAN
VIETNAM
HONG KONG
PAKISTAN

SOUTH AMERICA
MEXICO

AFRICA

SOUTH AFRICA


TRANSLATION AFFILIATES


OTHERS
  • Novell OpenCourseWare
    Novell OpenCourseWare is a collection of educational materials developed by Novell Training Services for authorized courses and other customer training purposes.


OER/FREE REPOSITORIES
Below is a list of OER/FREE learning repositories that are not directly linked with any particular university, but are still wonderful repositories or collections of free content that we can in some way or the other use for our courses:
GENERAL
  • Wikipedia
    Wikipedia is an amazing encyclopedia (of anything you can think of!) written collaboratively by many of its readers.
  • MERLOT
    Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials.
  • Wikinews
    Free-content online news source where any site visitor can add or edit stories.
  • Answers.com
    Answers.com offers free access to millions of topics from the world's leading publishers.
  • Internet Archive
    The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
  • Fathom Archive
    Offers access to the complete range of free content developed for Fathom by its member institutions including lectures, articles, interviews, exhibits and free seminars.
  • GLOBE
    The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) is an international consortium that strives to make shared online learning resources available to educators and students around the world.
  • dgCommunities
    dgCommunities (Provided by Development Gateway Foundation) is a collaborative space for professionals working to reduce poverty and promote sustainable development worldwide (Members in more than 200 countries).
  • HowStuffWorks
    HowStuffWorks explains hundreds of subjects, from car engines to lock-picking to ESP, using clear language and tons of illustrations.
  • OpenDOAR
    Is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here.
  • AT&T Knowledge Network Explorer - Blue Web'n Homepage
    Blue Web'n is a huge online library categorized by subject, grade level, and format (tools, references, lessons, hotlists, resources, tutorials, activities, projects). The content categories available are: arts, business, education, English, foreign languages, health, history and social studies, maths, science, technology among others.
  • Monterey Institute for Technology and Education National Repository of Online Courses (NROC)
    A growing library of high-quality online courses for students and faculty in higher education, high school and Advanced Placement. Courses in the NROC library are contributed by developers from leading online-learning programs across the US.
  • Apple Learning Interchange
    Is a social network for educators, where you can find content ranging from simple lesson ideas to in-depth curriculum units for K-12 and Higher Education.
  • ARIADNE
    The core of the ARIADNE infrastructure is a distributed network of learning repositories.
  • CAREO
    The Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects (CAREO) project aims to create both an online repository of educational objects for post-secondary educators and a community that both creates and supports those objects.
  • Intute
    A free online service providing you with access to Web resources for education and research. Areas: Science and Technology, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Health and Life, and Sciences.
  • Ideas
    An initiative by the University of Wisconsin to identify, evaluate, catalog, and align to the Wisconsin education standards resources that are already on the Internet, such as lesson plans and reference materials.
  • JORUM
    Jorum is a free online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK Further and Higher Education Institutions, helping to build a community for the sharing, reuse and repurposing of learning and teaching materials.
  • LeMill - Learning Mill
    Web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources.
  • Curriki (K-12)
    Internet site for Open Source Curriculum (OSC), which will provide universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for grades K-12.
  • DAREnet
    DAREnet is a search service which gives free access to academic research output in the Netherlands. DAREnet consists of more than 146.000 digital objects.
  • EdNA Online (Aus)
    Education Network Australia (edna) is Australia’s leading online resource collection and collaborative network for the education and training community.
  • EducaNext
    EducaNext is a service supporting the creation and sharing of knowledge for Higher Education.
  • Eureka
    A collective catalog of teaching and learning resources gathered by various organizations involved in the production of ITC educational resources.
  • ALISON (Workplace Skills)
    Including Touch Typing Skills, European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), British Computer Society (BCS) Unit E, Financial Literacy and e-Citizen.
  • HippoCampus (High School)
    Multimedia and course materials that can help students with their homework and studies.
  • Maricopa Learning eXchange
    Is an electronic warehouse of ideas, examples, and resources (represented as "packages") that support student learning at the Maricopa Community Colleges.
  • PEOI
    Professional Educational Organization International (PEOI) was created, and is run by volunteers who believe that it is time for open post secondary education be made available to all free of charge.
  • WannaLearn.com
    Here you can find over 350 categories of free, first-rate, family-safe online tutorials, guides and instructionally oriented Websites.
  • LoLa Exchange
    LoLa is an exchange for facilitating the sharing of high-quality learning objects. It contains materials for use across the curriculum, with a particular focus on modules for Information Literacy.
  • Free Online Schools
    A useful collection of free learning resources from a variety of disciplines (Art & Design, Science, Medicine & Health, Engineering, etc) and schools.
  • The Most Important Open Course Materials Online

EDUCATION
  • TeacherTube
    Online community for sharing instructional videos.
  • T4 Tips Podcasts
    Audio and video educational technology podcasts providing you tips, guidance and ideas on how to use different learning tools to facilitate effective learning.
  • GEM (Gateway to 21st Century Skills)
    Thousands of free lesson plans and other teaching and learning resources.
  • SuTree (Educational Videos)
    SuTree is a knowledge community and an aggregator of instructional & educational videos.
  • EdTechTalk
    A community of educators interested in discussing and learning about the uses of educational technology. They webcast several live shows each week.

SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
  • VideoLectures.Net
    Free access to high-quality scientific video lectures.
  • The nanoHUB
    Is a rich, web-based resource for research, education and collaboration in nanotechnology. The nanoHUB hosts over 1600 resources which will help you learn about nanotechnology, including Online Presentations, Courses, Learning Modules, Podcasts, Animations, Teaching Materials, and more. Most importantly, the nanoHUB offers simulation tools which you can access from your web browser, so you can not only learn about but also simulate nanotechnology devices.
  • Computer Science Teaching Center
    A digital archive of peer reviewed resources for teaching computer science. Submission restricted to registered users.
  • CITIDEL
    Computing and IT Interactive Digital Educational Library Repository (CITIDEL) is a great resource to discover computer Science education and research materials.
  • e-LEE (Electrical Engineering)
    e-Learning tools for Electrical Engineering.
  • Exploratories
    A project of Brown University's Computer Graphics Research Group to create a set of exemplary Web-based learning objects (Java applets) that teach concepts in introductory computer graphics at the college and graduate level. Users can download complete Java applets, or build their own from the components collection.
  • EEVL (Engineering, Maths & Comp.)
    A guide to engineering, mathematics and computing information on the internet.
  • iLumina
    iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science.
  • SMETE Digital Library
    Here you can access a wealth of teaching and learning materials as well as join this expanding community of science, math, engineering and technology explorers of all ages.
  • arXiv.org e-Print archive
    arXiv, set up by Cornell University, is an e-Print archive specializing in Physics, Mathematics, Nonlinear Sciences, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology.
  • HEAL (Health Education Assets Library)
    HEAL's mission is to provide free digital resources of the highest quality that meet the needs of today's health sciences educators.
  • College of Health Professions (COHP) Online Learning Resources
    Including Dental Hygiene, Health Science, Communicative Sciences & Disorders Medical Technology, Nursing Radiologic Sciences, Respiratory Therapy and Physical Therapy.

HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES
  • The Digital Scriptorium
    Is an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.
  • John Locker - Free Documentaries
    Educate yourself with free documentaries online on History, Science, Music, War, Religions, Politics, Conspiracies, and more!

MATHEMATICS
  • The Math Forum (Drexel University)
    The Math Forum Is a the leading online resource for improving math learning, teaching, and communication since 1992, created by teachers, mathematicians, researchers, students, and parents. It offers a wealth of problems and puzzles, online mentoring, research, team problem solving, collaborations and professional development.
  • Math World
    A mathematical specific repository, created by Wolfram Research. Contains web based (HTML) resources about algebra, applied mathematics, calculus and analysis, discrete mathematics, geometry, history, number theory, probability, statistics and topology, etc.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
  • Eduforge
    Eduforge is an open access environment designed for the sharing of ideas, research outcomes, open content and open source software for education.
  • W3Schools
    At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.
  • Edumax
    Edumax is an online learning website that provides free lessons on topics from personal development to computer programming.

TEXTBOOKS
  • Google Book Search
    In addition to searching, viewing and downloading books, you also receive links to reviews, references, and even a world map showing every location mentioned in the book.
  • Gutenberg Project
    Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.
  • Scribd
    Research, ebooks, poetry, presentations, schoolwork, and more are all available on this site.
  • LearnOutLoud.com
    Browse over 15,000 educational audio books, MP3 downloads, podcasts, and videos.
  • Librivox
    LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Their goal is to make all public domain (under U.S. right) books available as free audio books. It is a volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.
  • Global Text Project
    The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a Web site.
  • Textbook Revolution
    All of the books are offered for free by their respective copyright holders for online viewing. The categories of the textbooks are: Biology, Business & Management, Chemistry, Computers-Tech, Earth Sciences, Economics, Engineering, Health Sciences & Medical, History, Math and Physics.
  • The Oxford Text Archive
    It collects, catalogues, preserves and distributes high-quality digital resources for research and teaching. They are currently holding thousands of texts in more than 25 different languages, and are actively working to extend their catalogue of holdings.
  • freetechbooks.com
    This site offers free books, text books, and lecture notes for computer science, engineering, and computer programming students and professionals.
  • Free Online Programming Books
    A list of 300+ free programming books available on the Internet.
  • Great Books Index
    Browse by author or title to find text for several books from the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World.
  • CIA World Factbook
    Current, in-depth data on every country in the world.

DIGITAL LIBRARIES
  • World Digital Library
    Will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials.
  • ERIC
    The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) provides free access to more than 1.2 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials and, if available, includes links to full text.
  • OAISTER
    OAIster is a union catalog for a wide range of digital resources. They provide access to these digital resources by "harvesting" their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).
  • Columbia University Libraries Digital Collections
    Find more than 10 different digital collections that range from medieval and early Renaissance manuscripts to architectural drawings or visit the online exhibitions for even more.
  • Library of Congress Digital Collections (US)
    It is considered the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections.
  • Universal Digital Library
    Their goal is to preserve every printed book digitally in this resource. The library currently holds one million books in its collection.
  • NEEDS Digital Library
    A digital library with links to online learning materials in engineering and related areas of science and math.
    NSDL - The National Science Digital Library (US)
    The Nation's (US) online library for education and research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics.
  • eGranary Digital Library
    Provides millions of digital educational resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access.

DIGITAL MEDIA
  • TED Talks
    Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers.
  • Big Think
    A new and growing website, currently in its beta version, with a simple mission: to move the discussion away from talking heads and talking points, and give it back to you.
  • FORA.tv
    FORA.tv delivers discourse, discussions and debates on the world's most interesting political, social and cultural issues, and enables viewers to join the conversation.
  • WGBH (Free Public Lectures)
    Free live and on-demand lectures given by some of the world's foremost scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policy makers and community leaders.
  • Annenberg Media Resources
    Annenberg Media's multimedia resources help teachers increase their expertise in their fields and assist them in improving their teaching methods.
  • Flickr
    Flickr is photo distributed classification system. It is useful for managing and sharing photos over the Internet. If users want to use a photo of another photographer, if they have created an account they can contact each other through the Flickr intranet. Copyright issues are solved with Creative Commons Licences. You can find millions of free images here, which we can use to spice up our learning content.
  • Education Podcast Network
    The Education Podcast Network is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century.
  • Creative Commons
    Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

YOUTUBE CHANNELS
  • GoogleTalks
    Google events featuring everyone from newsmakers to bestselling authors (Joseph Stieglitz, Obama, Richard Florida, etc.).
  • Google Tech Talks
    There are a large number of technical talks at Google. Many of these are videotaped, and some are made available for external viewing right here.
  • The Nobel Prize
    It brings you fascinating insights into the minds of current and past Nobel Laureates.
  • TED Talks
    This is the YouTube version of TED Talks, which is a collection of inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers.
  • FORA.tv
    The YouTube version of FORA.tv, which delivers discourse, discussions and debates on the world's most interesting political, social and cultural issues, and enables viewers to join the conversation.
  • Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
    It's mission is to promote in-depth coverage of international affairs, focusing on topics that have been under-reported, mis-reported - or not reported at all. The videos you see in this YouTube collection are one part of larger reporting projects from around the world.
  • BBC Worldwide
    The Best of British TV. Top Gear, Mighty Boosh, Doctor Who, Attenborough, Parkinson, Catherine Tate & the rest from BBC Worldwide!
  • National Geographic
    Inspiring People To Care About The Planet!

WOW! Where to start! Alright, I have to admit that this post is not a smashing one yet. Give me a few weeks of reflection, feedback and smashing, and hopefully the compilation will be a useful starting point and quick access to OER and OCW (Just keep in mind that OCW is OER, but OER is not necessarily OCW! Whatever!). I am beginning to sense OER/OCW information overload here. If I am not mistaken, it would take me approximately 754 years to digest all the resources currently linked here. However, if we connect, network, collaborate, learn and reflect together we might manage to digest (to innovate and improve) these free learning resources in less than 24 hours. Let's use our connective intelligence to educate the world about OER and OCW :)
Until we explore, we will never know! Have fun learning!
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