An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.

The term ‘open educational resources’ was first adopted at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Folowing this the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) initiative to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the end of the year 2007. The initiative has encouraged a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources culminating in the formation of the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

You can find course materials by browsing individual OpenCourseWare sites or by searching across all courses (English-language versions) at The OpenCourseWare Consortium. OpenCourseWare Finder is another great place that help you in finding the course you are looking for.

A few handpicked OpenCourseWare sites:

1. MIT OpenCourseWare
2. Tufts OpenCourseWare
3. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s OpenCourseWare
4. Novell OpenCourseWare
5. Notre Dame OpenCourseWare
6. The University of California, Irvine OpenCourseWare

‘It’s not that easy to find good academic content online, so it was great to find that OpenLearn was so in depth – very similar to studying at degree level. There was plenty of reading, background information and resources and exercises that helped to develop my thinking further.’ – Kim, Oswestr

What is OpenLearn-ing?
OpenLearn is online learning that is open to anyone, anywhere in the world using materials taken from Open University courses. And it is completely free to use! Instead of attending classes, you study online in the LearningSpace, using materials that have been specially designed for distance learning.

OpenLearn does not require you to be or become an Open University student and does not grant degrees or award credit.

OpenLearn is an opportunity for informal study – in your own time access materials in areas familiar or new to you, without the pressure of keeping to a timetable or sitting exams. Instead, assess your own progress by keeping an online learning journal, discussing the topics with other online learners in forums and completing self assessment exercises where you control when the answer is revealed. While OpenLearn isn’t exactly the same as studying at University, it gives real learning experiences taken from degree courses – and for free!

We suggest you go to the LearningSpace, where you will find all the free course materials. If you are new to study you might want to start in the Study Skills section, or simply browse through the options available in an area of interest – there are 11 topic areas, from arts to science. Each topic has a range of study units from access to masters level, each lasting between 3 and 20 hours.

You can get straight into the materials without registering, but to get the most from the website we recommend you spend a few minutes setting up a free learning profile. This will give you added benefits such as being able to enrol on study units and find other learners with the same interests.

Giving online learning a social life

You can join and set up your own video conferences to meet online learners from anywhere in the world, or chat online using text chat. You’ll be able to see who else is studying the same material as you and find yourself a study buddy! You can also create knowledge maps to help you organise the information in a way that makes sense of it for you, and draws in your previous knowledge or research on the subject.

Whether you are new to study and want to try out Higher Education materials, or whether you are an old timer in academia wanting to keep up to date, we hope you find OpenLearn a rich resource for online learning. It will keep growing as we add more materials from our courses. So watch this space, or better still, sign up to our newsletter or a forum to keep up to date with developments.