Open Course Materials

Open Course Materials are more generally known as OpenCourseWare. The term "OpenCourseWare" was coined by MIT with the launch of its initiative by the same name in 2002.

OpenCourseWare

  • a free and open digital publication of high quality college and university‐level educational materials

  • which are organized as courses,

  • often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content, and

  • are free and openly licensed, accessible to anyone, anytime via the internet.

There are countless openly available course materials in a variety of disciplines if you know where to locate them. SBCTC (developer of Open Washington) has vetted the sites that provide some of the best quality open course materials, such as assessments, syllabi, readings, and lectures. These resources have been broken down to help you choose those that best fit your needs.

For each resource, you will find a list of unique traits, licensing information, and an example of how to attribute the source. Hover over “Open Course Materials Search” in the blue navigation bar above, then choose one of the media sources listed for more details.

1. Go to Open Washington [New Window]. Under Find OER, you will see four media categories. Course Materials is the third.

2. Once on the Course Materials page you will see many, many OER sites that provide open course materials such as assessments, syllabi, and readings.

3. We will explore one of these sites. Click MIT OpenCourseWare. Again, you are taken to a feature page telling you more about this site. Click on MIT OpenCourseWare.

4. Click the Find Courses tab and then Topic.

5. Choose a topic. For this example, we will select Humanities and the related sub-topics and specialties will appear. Once you have made your choice in a specialty, the results will appear below.

6. Choose one of the courses that appears under Results. A window will appear with more information on the course. Click View Course.

7. The course content will appear.

Notice the course materials have been curated with assigned readings, lecture slides, assignments, and a link to download all course materials. In this particular example, the course is designed around a textbook that can be rented or purchased via Amazon, so while the course materials are licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (again we will learn more about licenses in Week 5), there is still a cost for students.

Next, let's search through Open Videos to find more materials you can use.

Go to Open Video>>

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