10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should)

By Audrey Watters
This week, the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 year
s of OpenCourseWare. The movement to make university-level content freely and op
enly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put
the materials from all 2,000 of the university s courses on the Web.
With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational mov
ement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described in her opening remarks a
t yesterday s meeting as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient ac
ademic tradition: the tradition of the global intellectual commons.
We have looked here before at how OCW has shaped education in the last ten years
, but in many ways much of the content that has been posted online remains very
much Web 1.0. That is, while universities have posted their syllabi, handouts, and
quizzes online, there has not been
until recently much Web 2.0 OCW resources
le opportunity for interaction and engagement with the material.
But as open educational resources and OCW increase in popularity and usage, ther
e are a number of new resources out there that do offer just that. You probably
already know about: Khan Academy and Wikipedia, for example. But in the spirit o
f 10 years of OCW, here s a list of 10 cool OER and OCW resources that you might n
ot know about, but should know:
P2PU: The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project in which
anyone can participate. Volunteers facilitate the courses, but the learners are
in charge. P2PU leverages both open content and the open social web, with a mod
el for lifelong learning.
OpenStudy: OpenStudy is a social learning network where independent learners and
traditional students can come together in a massively-multiplayer study group.
Through OpenStudy, learners can find other working in similar content areas in o
rder to support each other and answer each others questions. OpenStudy supports a
number of study groups, including those focused on several MIT OCW courses.
NITXY: NIXTY is building a learning management platform that supports open educa
tion resources. Rather than an LMS that closes off both academic resources and a
cademic progress, NIXTY is designed to support open courses so that schools, tea
chers, and students work is not necessarily closed off from the rest of the Web.
OER Glue: Still under development, OER Glue will be a site to watch. The Utah-ba
sed startup is building a browser-based tool that will allow students and teache
rs to glue together OER resources online. Rather than having to copy-and-paste res
ources into a new setting, OER Glue will reuse and integrate resources.
iUniv: iUniv is a Japanese startup that is building web and mobile apps to suppo
rt and make social video and audio OCW content. Resources can be shared to Twitt
er, Facebook, and Evernote so that students can actively engage in discussions a
round OCW content.
OCWSearch: OCW Search is a search engine dedicated, as the name suggests, to hel
ping learners find OCW content. The project is, unfortunately, no longer under d
evelopment, but it does index ten universities OCW content, including MIT, Notre
Dame, and The Open University UK.
Smarthistory: Smarthistory is a free and open multimedia website that demonstrat
es how very heavy, pricey, and obsolete the traditional art history textbook is.
CK-12: The CK-12 Foundation s Flexbook platform provides free, collaboratively-bui
lt and openly-licensed digital textbooks for K-12. Much of the content is standa
rds based.
Flat World Knowledge: This is a college textbook publisher whose books are publi
shed under an open license. This allows professors to customize the books they o
rder edit, add to, mix-up
or use as-is. Students can access the books online for
free or can pay for print-on-demand and audiobook versions.
Connextions: Connextions is a repository of educational content, containing over

litt

17,000 openly licensed learning modules.