OpenCourseWare: Universities Offering OpenCourseware Collections
Technological advancements in recent years have truly globalized the education sector. Apart from the ready availability of authentic research resources over the internet, e-learning classes offered by institutes and private tutors, and spurt of dissertation and coursework writing help firms; there is yet another realm that has expanded the horizons of teaching and learning and has brought education to a whole new level: OpenCourseWare.
What is an OpenCourseWare?
- An OpenCourseWare, or OCW as it is generally named, is a digital publication of high-quality, university level educational material which is free and open to access via the internet. These materials are organized as courses, audio, and video lectures which can be downloaded from the universities’ websites.
- An OpenCourseWare is a collection of audio and video lectures delivered at the prestigious universities. Theses lectures are presented as podcasts for public viewing and can be downloaded free of cost in all available audio and video formats, anytime and from anywhere via the internet.
- An OpenCourseWare is a collection of free non-credit courses, often accompanied by course planning materials, reference sources and evaluation tools to help students and teachers get the best of education material delivered by the professors of world class universities.
Resources for OpenCourseWare
Many organizations have come together to pool in resources where students, teachers and academic scholars can have the best of OpenCourseWare collection available on the internet. The OpenCourseWare collection on these resource sites can be accessed categorically, either by subject search, university search, topic search or a keyword search. Accessing the educational material spread over the world wide web via these resource sites is easier, as every link to the university websites accompanies reviews and ratings, letting the user choose the best resource available on a given subject. You can also take part in discussion forums on these sites and rate the educational material.
Academic Earth : Academic Earth offers a pool of online degrees and OpenCourseWare collection from leading universities, bringing the best under one roof. With a quick keyword search, you can have all the available educational material at your disposal.
Open courseware consortium : OCW Consortium is a community of organizations and universities dedicated to advancing OpenCourseWare. Access thousands of courses from universities all over the world.
OEDb: Online Education Database : At OEDb, you can take any college class for free. There are 236 OpenCourseWare collections, podcasts, and videos to choose from.
Videolectures.net : Videolectures.net not only has a vast array of university lectures but also has a record of events, workshops and conferences on various topics held at the universities.
List of Universities Offering Open Courses
Massachusetts Institute of Technology : MIT is the pioneer of OpenCourseWare and has the most exhaustive OpenCourseWare collection than can be found elsewhere. It covers not only technology and science subjects but also literature, women studies, philosophy, among many others. The courses are available in several languages.
Stanford University: The OpenCourseWare material on the Stanford website can be downloaded via iTunes. To access the video lectures of the engineering and science courses at Stanford, log on to Stanford Engineering Everwhere.
Harvard Extension School : The Harvard Extension School’s Open Learning Initiative brings a selection of non-credit online courses featuring Harvard faculty to the public for free.
McGill University : McGill University offers science course material and lectures for free viewing and download.
UC Berkeley : University of California – Berkeley offers courses on almost all subjects ranging from anthropology to literary theory to chemistry. Hundreds of courses are webcasted every semester, adding up to the comprehensive archives.
Yale University: Through its Open Yale Courses website, Yale University offers high quality video lectures on various topics.
Carnegie Mellon : Through its open learning initiative program, Carnegie Melon offers limited, yet resourceful and highly-rated educational resources on subjects ranging fromengineering statistics to French to biotechnology.
Utah State University: Utah State University offers a selective and specific range of online courses on subjects ranging from biological and irrigation engineering to instructional technology and learning sciences to theatre arts.
University of Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame offers OpenCourseWare on a wide variety of subjects, covering mainly humanities. Subjects include philosophy, peace studies, Latino and Africa studies among others.
For an exhaustive list of Universities offering OpenCourseWare collections, refer to DegreeDirectory.org
While many universities are still working on their OpenCourseWare programs and many others are yet to add a comprehensive list of subjects and topics to their online courses, the best way to stay updated on the programs included in the courseware is to subscribe to the universities’ RSS feed or podcasts.
Tina Rathore is a freelance writer and poet, currently working on her doctoral thesis on Thomas Stearns Eliot. An academic by profession, she teaches English language and literature at freelance. She maintains a personal blog on literature and writes on varied subjects, of which education and art are her forte.
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