<
 
 
 
 
×
>
You are viewing an archived web page, collected at the request of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) using Archive-It. This page was captured on 02:11:55 Dec 20, 2015, and is part of the UNESCO collection. The information on this web page may be out of date. See All versions of this archived page.
Loading media information hide

What are some examples of OER projects?

One of the best examples of OERs is the MIT OpenCourseWare project, which makes the course materials from nearly all MIT courses free and available online.

Jean-Ronel Noel and Alex Georges, Entrepreneurs from Cité Soleil, Haiti, used OCW to develop solar-powered streetlights for some of Haiti’s poorest communities. In their own words, “MIT Open Courseware was different because it explained things step by step. Using the Open Courseware saved us a lot of time and money.”

Another good example is national legislation introduced by the government of Brazil to mandate that all educational materials produced with public funds be open-licensed. Dep. Paulo Teixeira, Brazil released the following statement about the decision: “I believe that the ones that receive all these amounts of public money have an obligation to the society to share the outcomes of their research and its development with the society who financed them, allowing the free use of such educational resources.”

The World Bank has recently launched the Open Knowledge Repository, an online collection of World Bank publications released under Creative Commons licensing. Through the repository, their research and reports are published online for educators, researchers and students around the world. Rather than making their information only available to those who can afford to pay for it, now lecturers from any university to incorporate reports and data from the World Bank into their classes. In addition, anyone with an interest in topics ranging from education reform in Mozambique to Afghanistan’s opium economy challenges can now read the World Bank’s reports on these topics online.

Back to top