Open Access: Boston University joins in!
I read from the Library Journal today that Boston University has approved moving to an institution-wide open access system. This decision comes one year after Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences provided open access to their curriculum. The difference between the two is that Boston University’s open access initiative includes ALL 17 schools. (Harvard University’s policy is a little more selective at the moment – it does not include its professional schools, with the exception of its Law School).
Perusing through these sites made me curious for more information…
… What other schools are sharing content?
Many schools have sought financial assistance via the William & Flora Hewitt Foundation’s Open Educational Resources (OER) program. The foundation is working to make high quality and educational content freely available on the web. From the link above, one can see their grantees’ proposals, which include various educational institutions seeking to increase open access opportunities for many exciting programs, for example:
- Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative
- Yale University’s Open Courses
- Utah State University’s OpenCourseWare
- University of California-Berkeley’s webcast.berkeley
- Tufts University’s OpenCourseWare
- Massachusettes Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare
From the Do-it-Yourself-Scholar blog, Dara has compiled a great listing of open-access courses, lectures and postcasts. The Do-It-Yourself-Scholar has scoured the internet for open access courses and lectures offered by universities. What a wonderful resource!
From OpenCulture: a link to Free Online Courses from Great Universities. This post is over a year old, but the podcasts recommended within it are plentiful and still applicable. (On a side note, they have a link to great cultural educational resources on twitter such as the Internet Archive, Librivox, TEDtalks, and so on).
AcademicEarth.org – an organization dedicated to sharing education throughout the world. They offer links to “thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars. ”
How freakin’ awesome is it to have free access to worldly knowledge from scholars at the greatest universities?! I can’t contain myself.
Wait, there’s more!
Want to know more about Open Educational Resources? I strongly suggest checking this out:
Baker, J. (2007, May 5). Introduction to Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from the Connexions Web site: http://cnx.org/content/col10413/1.2/
And I strongly suggest trying this out:
OCW Finder from the Open Courseware Consortium – it searches for courses by tag (e.g., subject!)
Photo credit: Ask Me About Open Access from flikr member molliali has a creative commons license Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic.
