Introducing the Open CourseWare Consortium

Stephen Carson, OpenCourseWare Grows into a Movement, Open Educational Resources Newsletter, Summer 2006 (scroll to the fourth story).

An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality teaching materials, organized as courses. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.

The Goals of the Consortium: [1] Extend the reach and impact of opencourseware by encouraging the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials around the world. [2] Foster the development of additional opencourseware projects. [3] Ensure the long-term sustainability of opencourseware projects by identifying ways to improve effectiveness and reduce costs.

The OpenCourseWare (OCW) Consortium is a growing collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. Consortium members include universities from China, ParisTech "Graduate School", Japan OCW Consortium, India, South Africa, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Thailand and Vietnam.

We are pleased to announce the unveiling of the OCW Consortium Portal now available. The site includes a basic cross-site search functionality for member institution sites, a list of participating institutions (linked to profiles of each school if provided), and information for other institutions or organizations who may be interested in sharing their content or supporting the movement. In addition, the site includes news from around the consortium.