Creative Commons recently joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium as an “Affiliate Organization.” The Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world – including China, France, Japan, the UK, the USA and Vietnam – who are commited to 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. “OpenCourseWare” is the free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.

OpenCourseWare Consortium recently launched the OCW Consortium Portal site, which provides easy access to materials from nearly 3,000 courses openly published by 50 member institutions largely using Creative Commons licenses. Courseware is available in nine languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai — and comes from leading institutions around the world. The site also provides information for schools considering open publication of course materials, including information on handling intellectual property concerns and choosing an appropriate license.