The United Nations University, an official member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, has just launched their web learning portal. Joining more than 100 other institutions of higher education, UNU is providing open access to an initial dozen training courses, spanning from subjects like Integrated Water Resources Management to the Social Construction of Technology in Development.  The courses are aimed towards educators, students,…

Today Yale College announced Open Yale Courses, thereby making a collection of Yale courses freely available online. Along with MIT’s recent announcement, this is fantastic news for the open education movement. “Open Yale Courses,” presents unique access to the full content of a selection of college-level courses and makes them available in various formats, including…

Image courtesy Steve Carson | CC BY-NC-SA Congratulations to MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which has recently passed the 1,800-course mark. First announced in 2001, MIT OCW has grown from a 50-course pilot to a site that includes virtually the entire MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Like many OCW projects, MIT uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share…

Recently, Creative Commons launched ccLearn, an educational arm of CC whose mission aims “to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.” Yesterday, ccLearn director Ahrash Bissell and Creative Commons CTO Nathan Yergler spoke at the OpenCourseWare Consortium Conference at Utah State. Their presentation laid out…

Computerworld just published a short (and friendly, despite the “hot seat” title) interview with MIT professor and CC board member Hal Abelson. Much of the interview concerns Creative Commons and MIT OpenCourseWare, but is worth reading for some perspective even if you already know everything there is to know about CC and OCW. My favorite…

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 who are commited to creating a broad and deep body of open educational content. For more information, visit the Consortium’s site.

Why version 3.0? As was mentioned a little while ago, we are looking to move ahead with versioning the CC licenses up to version 3.0 to improve the clarity of the terms of the licenses and to address some concerns of one of our first and very prominent license adopters — MIT, with their OpenCourseWare…

I had the pleasure of speaking on two panels recently. Last Thursday, I participated in The Open Source Paradigm at the SF MOMA, an event aimed to explore the history of open-source, and find new applications of its concepts in art. A few interesting ideas came out of the panel including a No Military Use…

I’m at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation today and tomorrow for an “open knowledge” grantees’ meeting. It’s striking (1) how large the group is this year and (2) how many other grantees are close friends of and collaborators with Creative Commons: The Internet Archive, Connexions, MIT OpenCourseware, David Wiley, Foothill-De Anza Community College, and…

The September issue of Wired Magazine features an article called “MIT Everyware” about the OpenCourseWare project, which aims to offer material from every course at MIT, all under a Creative Commons license. As the article suggests, various educational organizations around the world have sprung up to help translate and disseminate the materials. Here’s a translation…