WEEK 2: Existing OER projects

I’ve been familiar with all these open education projects for a while;

• Open University (UK) Open Content Initiative
• Rice Connexions
• MIT OpenCourseWare
• LeMill.net
• Wikiversity.org

The OpenCourseWare project at MIT has always amazed me the most. Cause to see all their curriculum online and available for download just seems to go against the American ideology of capitalism. I’ve always been surprised that they are putting it out there for free and under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. I remember reading a while back how they aligned what they were doing with opencourseware and the universities mission. As their mission states they want to "advance knowledge and educate students ... that will best serve ... the world", there doin' it!

When I was looking at all these open education projects I was asking myself, which one I would use if I was developing a new course or program. And what was important to me is that I am familiar with the technology (publishing and course development tools) and that the project embraces a licensing scheme that I am happy with. The licensing scheme is important as it encourages or restrains the reuse of my work. I was pleasantly surprised to see that all the projects have embraced a CC license of some sort. So I felt comfortable that I could work with all sites. Being familiar with the technology pushed me toward Wikiversity. I am already familiar with using MediaWiki to publish content and find it an effective tool for developing courses online.