What is OpenCourse.org?

Opencourse.org is a free collaboration platform for educators. Take a tour of OpenCourse.org or see presentations about Open Course.

What is an Open Course Community?

A collaboration of teachers, researchers and students with the common purpose of developing open, reusable learning assets (e.g. animations, simulations, models, case studies, etc.). For examples of open course communities, click on the Collaboratories tab above and browse through our communities. For an example of effective use of a wiki, see the collab for the Study of Doug Engelbart's Ideas .

What is a Reusable Learning Asset (RLA)?

Any digital artifact that is valuable for learning and useful in a variety of contexts. It may be as simple as a text document or diagram, or as elaborate as a SCORM learning object, but its essential feature is that educators will want to reuse it. This site provides tools and collaboration support especially for the development of RLAs. For example, see the RLAs of the Harvey Project collab .

Who can Participate?

Anyone with an interest in education, collaboration and sharing. Whether you're a technophobe or a technophile, you will find projects here that you can contribute to. To join one of the existing communities, just click on "Join this Collab".

Note added 9/5/2006: because of a recent rash of spammers, the Join link has been temporarily disabled. If you are not already a member of OpenCourse.org and would like to join, please send an email to support(at)opencourse(dot)org

To start a collab of your own, or to use OpenCourse.org services for your own developer community, please contact us at info(at)opencourse(dot)org and tell us what you have in mind. OpenCourse.org provides the necessary tools and resources so that a group of faculty developers can go from concept to collaboration in a half hour or less.

Questions?

See the OpenCourse.Org FAQ, or look at the presentations about Open Course and OpenCourse.org . There is no charge to create or maintain a collaboratory. The only requirement is that the content be open. OpenCourse.org is supported by a grant from the US National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Project .