The following information will help you locate open educational resources (OERs) and OpenCourseWare (OCW), find Open textbooks and discover other outstanding OCW Web sites.
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University of California, Irvine, visit http://www.uci.edu.
With 1800 courses and the uncontested parent of all things OCW, this is still the site that has the broadest collection. Because of the process in which they went from a pilot of 50 courses to placing all courses into the OCW collection, you will find some unevenness here, but there are still more courses of a high level here than in any other university collection.
Yale has a small collection, but each one of its courses is very complete, from video lectures to lecture notes. My personal favorite is the finance course by Robert Shiller.
It has the best collection of OCW in the French language, but it also one of the largest collections anywhere. Many of their courses are in English, so don't pass it by just because you don't parlez francais.
This network of universities in Latin American, Spain and Portugal have the largest collection of assets in the Spanish and Portuguese languages. Universia's OCW project began by translating MIT courses into Spanish and Portuguese. Today, their many affiliates produce hundreds of OCWs.
Perhaps my favorite OCW website, because they are exposing all of the assets in all of the courses in a variety of postgraduate degrees. They have the best collection on topics like water management, sustainability, nanotechnology, and offshore engineering. If you haven't seen this site, go there now.
Open Training Platform (UNESCO) - This is a collection with a development perspective.
A standout collection.
A large, diverse collection that spans its schools and departments.
One of the largest general collections of OCW in the United States.
While not limited to health, this excellent collection has significant collections in the area of medicine, dentistry, nutrition and public policy, and veterinary medicine.
The first Brazilian OCW site, its collection has grown to 21 courses rapidly and is one of the most visited OCW sites in the world. A UCI OCW partner, it translated and localized our Human Resources course, transforming it so that it was useful in Brazil. To date, more people have visited the Portuguese-language version in Brazil than our original course in the United States. FGV and FGV Online are known for the business, management and economics departments and their collection's strengths are in those areas. The FGV Law School, incidentally, is the leading light behind Creative Commons license development in Brazil. FGV is also one of the only universities that provides a "certificate of participation" for its OCW courses.
OER Africa is one of the earlier projects to use open educational resources to strengthen national and continental postsecondary institutions. The site's collection is focused on education and health and its search engine spans its own collection of African-generated assets, but also many of the other sites listed here.
The regional OCW consortia themselves can contain over a hundred individual universities. Some of these began with translation projects for MIT OCW, but soon began producing more and more courses. One of the weaknesses of the global effort is a lack of translation to Western languages from these primarily Asian consortia. See more detailed notes for each below.
Knowledge Hub is a project of the Tecnologico de Monterey, Mexico's best-known private university. It is a curated repository of links to open educational resources. What is unique about this repository is its method of ranking. Other sites have user rankings and even peer reviews. Knowledge Hub combines rankings, peer reviews, and places a checkmark on OER items that are now in use in one or more of Tecnologico de Monterey's classes. This broke new ground by asking "is it being used" and giving us a metric that may be the most useful of all.
This project out of Rice University is the only one that permits users to store all of their course contents in a unified repository format. As it nears or exceeds 10,000 modules, it, along with Merlot, are the most important open educational resource repositories. Unlike Merlot, because everything is stored inside the repository, there is an ease of assembling different modules into an entirely new course. Connexions provides easy importers for Word and a few other common formats.
Merlot may be the grandparent of educational repositories and is in the process of becoming more OER-centric. It's still a little kludgy finding out whether something is really OER or OCW. Nevertheless, the process of adding something to their database is very quick and easy. Because of that, UCI maintains a complete list of its courses in Merlot. Like Connexions, this is a large repository and it would be hard not to find something close to what you are looking for.
A bit like Merlot, this site always focused on OER/OCW, as its name implies. Materials can be contributed, tagged, rated, and reviewed. Developed by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), OERCommons is one of the better known curated repositories.
Need a Creative Commons 3.0, attribution-only licensed graphic of the Eiffel Tower? Flickr is the place to go. It has hundreds of thousands of CC-licensed graphics and you can specify what the license terms should be.
I have to admit that it's not my favorite place, because the user interface is not the open Web, but the slow and hard-to-use iTunes software. Having said that, lots of universities are putting up their video lectures on this site and we will continue to populate it ourselves, since UCI recently was awarded its own iTunes U site. UC Berkeley maintains a large number of its OCW video lectures on this site as well as on YouTube.
First, let's note what YouTube does not have - an OCW channel. Having said that, there is a lot of OCW video lectures on YouTube and there is a new EDU channel for educational content, including UC Berkeley's open assets and UCTV's not-for-profit, educational-use-only videos.
