Page:A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources.pdf/71



Introduction
This appendix provides an illustrative description of different kinds of facilities and services available online that are linked to Open Educational Resources (OER) in some form. The analysis is organized according to the following categories:


 * 1) Open Courseware (OCW) OER Repositories;
 * 2) University OCW Initiatives;
 * 3) Content Creation Initiatives;
 * 4) Subject-Specific OCW OER;
 * 5) Open Schooling Initiatives
 * 6) OCW OER Search.

Although the descriptions do not seek to be comprehensive, they provide a good snapshot view of what is available in each category. The appendix is supplemented by a more comprehensive catalogue of online facilities and services presented in Appendix Five.

OCW OER Repositories
Much work on OER in higher education has taken place in the United States of America (USA), but practices are growing rapidly internationally. One of the major approaches to promoting OER globally is through OpenCourseWare (OCW), where the focus is on developing and sharing freely available, stand-alone, online course, and teaching materials. OCW usually includes items such as lecture notes, reading lists, course assignments, syllabi, study materials, tests, samples and simulations. Much work in this regard has been done by the OpenCourseWare Consortium (www.ocwconsortium.org):

"The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from aroundthe world creating a broad and deep body of open educational contentusing a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium"