OCW Finder helps people find free online courses called OpenCourseWares (OCWs). Universities and other OCW providers can register their courses with OCW Finder to help people find them.
This week the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of opencourseware.
Are universities about credentials or research? Are they a repository of knowledge? It's important, O'Reilly argued, if you want to be innovative "to think about what job you do for your customers (for your students) and not just think about how you do that job today but why you do it."
"MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world. It will also enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences.
The first MITx course, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics), will be launched in an experimental prototype form. Watch this space for further upcoming courses, which will become available in Fall 2012."
Many universities are trying to figure out how they can build "something like YouTube" to support their educational activities. Most of them end up building things that are very little like YouTube in that they tend to lock down the content and make it hard to move into other spaces and mobilize in other conversations. In a sense, these university based sites are about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it.