OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES, COURSEWARE & REPOSITORIES: A PARADIGM SHIFT IN E-LEARNING

Ajeet Kumar Jha,

Defence Scientific Information & Documentation Centre (DESIDOC)

Metcalfe House, Delhi- 110054

ABSTRACT

To cope up with the technological advancement and the constraints of various copyright laws, the concept of open source educational resources and open courseware have been evolved. This paper discusses about the free and open source software and their characteristics. Deals with the various open educational resources and their characteristics. Highlights the various national and international attempts has been made in this area.

Keyword: OER, Open Educational Resources, OCW, Open Courseware, FOSS

1 INTRODUCTION

The overall shape of information society is changing day by day. It has become difficult to imaging the coming future due to technological advancement. Just think about 20 years back, Microsoft and IBM have their empire in the software fields. Every thing was priced and the computer people were totally depends upon them. But now there are just opposite situation. To break the monopolies of these commercial vendors, people come forward and the concept of open access, free software & open educational resources has been evolved. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is an important driving force in this change.

The free worldwide online encyclopedia, educational resources, open course materials, open and free online degrees, many operating systems, software with source code are show the open source revolution. Now a day many of these are available to users freely.

2 FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

With the technological advancements and to cope up with the copyright issues free and open source software (FOSS) established itself as vital software resources in almost all the areas of ICT. FOSS refers to software that is distributed under a license which is recognized either as free software or open source software (OSS). Basically the open source software has its roots in free software. The Free Software Foundation defines the free software as “the software that gives the user the freedom to share study and modify it”. It is called the free software because the user is free. It is a matter of users’ liberty, to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve. The free software is provided by Free Software Foundation (FSF) and open source software by Open Source Initiatives (OSI).

3 CHARACTERISTICS OF OPEN SOURCE/ FREE SOFTWARE

The FSF has identified the four characteristics i.e. freedom 0 to freedom 3 of FOSS. Apart from these, there are some more characteristics given below:

●       Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose

●       Freedom1: The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to users’ need. The access of the source code is precondition for this.

●       Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so user can help others.

●       Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program and release improvements for the benefit of masses.

●       Freedom 4: It should be commercial but not priced.

●       Freedom 5: It should be under GPL (General Public License).

●       Freedom 6: The licenses of free software are based on copyright.

●       Freedom 7: The software manuals should be available freely.

4 OPEN KNOWLEDGE INITIATIVE (OKI)

The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) is a MIT led community effort that has defined a service-oriented architecture to facilitate the construction and use of educational applications. OKI promotes specifications that describe how the components of a software environment communicate with each other and with other enterprise information and communications systems. The project is based on a modular and layered approach, which separates different types of services needed to support learning activities.

5 OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER)

Open Educational Resources can be defined as free and open digital publications of high quality materials organized as courses that include lectures, related reading materials, snapshots of discussions, assignments, evaluations, etc. Access to these resources radically breaks down the barriers to quality education and allows everyone to access course material that is prepared and evaluated by experts. Further, the educational resources available under the OER format have been evaluated not only by subject experts but also education experts to increase the educational utility of this material. In recent years, open educational resource material has been prepared in an open standard format and is interactive in nature (National Knowledge Commission Report on Open Access & Open Education Resources).

Open Educational Resources, or OER, is a term that came out of UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It is intended to denote “educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses re-mix, improve and redistribute” (Wikipedia).

Many OER initiatives have been motivated by the ideals of open science. It has sometimes been argued that all knowledge should be openly accessible and reusable, so that it can lead to societal benefits. The creation of knowledge occurs incrementally, by reinterpreting and adding to the existing “body of knowledge.” Proprietary and secret knowledge, therefore, can be viewed as unfair appropriation of the work of others. Particularly in the Western enlightenment movement, free knowledge has historically been perceived also as a key to individual freedom and social progress. As a result, the idea of free access to knowledge is deeply rooted in the norms of science. The OER tends to be associated more with the academic sector than with the association, charitable organization, or corporate sector. The availability and inclination of academic subject matter experts to participate in a movement of this sort is perhaps a driving reason for the academic stronghold in the movement, but certainly portions of the work being done by technical and management support organizations like Tech Soup (see TechSoup, Learning, and Web 2.0) fit under the OER umbrella, and groups like LINGOs are primed for making a more meaningful contribution to it than they appear to have done to date. The OER movement was partly inspired by the open source software movement where one give software away for free and allow others to use and improve it (this is the open side).

OER will facilitate educational transformation in essentially two different ways. It will be integrated in the existing educational practices, where the adoption of new technologies will gradually lead to new forms of practice. The impact and benefits of OER on existing practices can, in principle, be studied by analyzing how OER increases their efficiency. OER will, however, also enable qualitatively new practices and new approaches in organizing education and learning. In this case, the potential benefits need to be described qualitatively. Efficiency, by construction, can only measure improvement in a given process and it cannot, by definition, compare the benefits of incomparable things. When educational processes and objectives qualitatively change, new systems are needed for measuring their performance and benefits.

5. 1 Historical Development of OER

The credit to start OER goes to MIT. This was followed by The Open Courseware Consortium which is a by-product of MIT's OER initiative, and its rate of growth makes this a clear success in the educational field. Free online encyclopedia i.e. Wikipedia, Online collection i.e. Project Gutenberg, Linux as operating system, software such as openoffice.org, browser as Mozila, Google as search engines are some milestones in the Open CourseWare (OCW).

5.2 Charectiristics of OER

●       OERs provide teaching and learning materials that are freely available and offered online for anyone to use.

●       While some OERs include Open CourseWare or other educational materials, they may also offer the means to alter those courses through editing, adding to those courses through publication, and the ability to shape the tools that share those resources.

●       They may maintain forums or other platforms where individuals can collaborate on building educational tools and documentation and the reach for those materials.

6 OER IN INDIAN SCENARIO

6.1 NPTEL: NPTEL stands for National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. It is a joint venture by Seven IITs (Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai, Roorkee, Guwahati) and India Institute of Science, Bangalore funded by Ministry of Human Resource Development, Govt. of India. With the objective to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum based video and web courses, this programme is initially started in five major Engineering Subjects i.e. Civil Engineering, Computer Science & Engineering., Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Communication Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. Faculty from these various institutions are involved in developing their classroom course material in electronic form. Currently, the program has 120 web based courses and 115 video courses in the core sciences, computer science, civil engineering, electrical engineering, electronics and material engineering. The NPTEL also provides an opportunity for teachers and students from rural areas to learn from these high quality lectures and improve the quality of teaching in these rural colleges. The approximate cost of development of material per course is about Rs. 500,000 to 600,000. One must has register to access the site's contents

6.2 Ekalavya Project: The Ekalavya project is an attempt to generate an interactive platform for the creation, absorption, dissemination and usage of knowledge for the well being of the individual and the society. It is a significant step forward to bring together students, teachers, and working professionals to meaningfully enhance the productivity of the group and spread knowledge. The Ekalavya portal aims at a free exchange of knowledge and ideas, by placing all the relevant academic material in the open source, thus making considerable contribution to society. It is envisaged that the Ekalavya project will become an all-encompassing activity over the years, using IT effectively for education. It aspires to build large collaborative communities where seekers are matched by the givers. This project is launched by IIT, Bombay. In this project, the content is developed in various Indian languages and is distributed through the internet. The Ekalavya project has also developed an Open Source Educational Resources Animation Repository (OSCAR) and provides web-based interactive animations for teaching various concepts and technologies. OSCAR provides a platform for mentors/professors to suggest ideas for animation and for developers/students to create content based on the suggested ideas and guidance. Funding for the Ekalavya and OSCAR project comes mainly from private industry.

6.3 Education-Grid: The Education Grid portal is provided as a platform for the educational community to support generation and sharing of education resources across the different institutions, universities and colleges of higher education. The portal is also intended to facilitate collaboration, sharing of knowledge, best practices and co-operation to improve the quality of education offered in the colleges and in the open learning mode. In many ways, Education Grid is complementary to the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) that is being executed by the IITs and IISc to develop content in large number of courses for engineering colleges. It provides development and deployment of systems and processes that use NPTEL and other open content for conducting quality education in the colleges. It maintains pedagogically sound and refereed educational resources in identified subjects. Subject specific portals are developed and these portals are governed by subject experts within the program. This project is supported by the Human Resource Ministry at IIIT, Kerala. Currently, this program also offers open educational resources only in the sciences and engineering sciences.

6.4 Medknow Publications: Medknow Publications is the largest publisher in India for academic and scientific biomedical journals. Medknow pioneers in 'fee-less-free' model of open access publishing and provides immediate free access to the electronic editions of the journals without charging the author or author's institution for submission, processing or publication of the articles. Medknow, with over 40 print + online journals, is probably the largest open access publisher of print journals in the world which does not charge author or author institution for submission, processing or publication of articles.

6.5 e-GyanKosh: It is a national digital repository of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). It uses DSpace software for its development. This e-repository of knowledge envisages to store, index, preserve, distribute and share the digital learning resources for open & distance learing institutes. This repository is available on 24*7 basis. This repository was started with two communities: India and Pan African e-networks. Under the community India, there are sub-communities based on IGNOU various divisions/courses/schools.

6.6 UNESCO SALIS e-Learning Portal: This e-portal is developed for awareness raising on information literacy for South Asia. To access this portal one has to register which is free. With cooperation of UNESCO, the Society for the Advancement of Library & Information Science (SALIS), India launched a project ‘Interactive e-learning portal’ on information literacy competency development skills for South Asia. With the aim to raise awareness and enhance information Literacy competency skill for layman and informational professional, this project was started. The objective of this project is totally based on UNESCO’s mandate to bridge the digital divide & UNESCO’s vision of knowledge societies. It covers the course on ICT, information literacy, its standards, models, assessments, information service for disabled people, right to information, etc.

6.7 NCERT Online Textbook: NCERT has initiated the step towards making school textbooks available on the Internet for students and teachers. Through this endeavours a variety of pedagogical possibilities would open up for students and teachers throughout the country. To make available the textbooks to every users freely & to implement the right to know/ education, NCERT has developed this website. Almost the latest editions of books are available in e-format. This portal navigates to the user to textbook chapter by title/ subject of the book for a particular class.

6.8 CEC Learning Object Repository: This is an open courseware developed by Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC), New Delhi with the collaboration of UGC, Educational Multimedia Research Centre, Audio-Visual Research Centre, Vyas Channel. Under this project various multimedia based television programme has been developed which are based on syllabus of school, polytechnic & university levels. These are available on various national educational channels.

7 OER IN INTERNATIONAL SCENARIO

7.1 MIT Open Course Ware: MIT is known as the leading in this area when around six year back it had initiated this revolutionary movement. MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. The OCW provides open access to course materials for up to 1,550 MIT courses, representing 34 departments and all five MIT schools. The goal is to include materials from all MIT courses by next year. MIT's OCW began to provide users with open access to class syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and even a selection of video lectures in 2003. Eleven other U.S. colleges plan to follow MIT's example, and six of those 12 colleges have offered an online presence (other than MIT). It is just not a MIT degree and MIT does not provide any certificate of complitions. It covers almost all the subject areas such as Aeronautics and Astronautics , Anthropology, Architecture, Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Biology , Chemistry, etc.

7.2 Research Papers in Economics (RePEc): It is an collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 63 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of this project is a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. All RePEc materials are freely available. It holds about 5,80,000 items of interest, over 4,70,000 of which are available online.

7.3 Public Library of Science (PLoS): It is a non-profit advocacy and publishing organization. They publish a growing collection of open access scientific and medical journals whose complete contents are freely available online. Their long-term goals are to create an online "public library of science" containing every scientific and medical paper ever published and to develop the information technologies needed to maximize the value of this resource. This collection features videos produced by PLoS.

7.4 Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE): It is an educational non-profit organisation committed to improving access to education. This library of open educational resources features course materials for seven advanced placement courses from MITE. These high school level materials are available for free download. The various subjects in this are Calculus, Environmental Science, Physics, United States Government, United States History, etc.

7.5 Commonwealth of Learning (COL): This link navigates to the curriculum and course material development and transfer, one valuable tool among many contained on this site that will help in publishing efforts. COL also maintains two online databases of learning content (Learning Object Repository) that provides support to Commonwealth countries free of charge.

7.6 Utah State University Open Course Ware: It is a publication of Utah State University. With believe that all humans’ beings are endowed with a capacity to learn, improve, and progress an educational opportunity should be given to them, Utah State open courseware provides a collection of educational material used in formal campus courses, and seeks to provide people around the world with an opportunity to access high quality learning opportunities. Utah State University open courseware assures that no individual who is prepared and who desires the opportunity to advance his or her education is turned away. USU OCW provides an unprecedented degree of free and open access to the knowledge and expertise of our faculty for the benefit of every citizen of the state of Utah and every person in the world.

7.7 E-Science Projects: It is a project of Oxford University devoted to various subjects e.g. Physics, Engineering, Health, Biological Environment, Grid technology etc.

7.8 Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (JHSPH) Open CourseWare: This OCW provides access to content of the school's most popular courses in medicine. As challenges to the world's health escalate daily, the School feels a moral imperative to provide equal and open access to information and knowledge about the obstacles to the public's health and their potential solutions.

7.9 Tufts Open CourseWare: It is part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT that provides free access to course content for everyone online. Tufts' initial course offerings demonstrate the University's strength in the life sciences in addition to its multidisciplinary approach, international perspective and underlying ethic of service to its local, national and international communities. Some of the features of this OCW are does not require any registration, does not grant credit, degrees, or certificates, does not provide access to Tufts faculty; however feedback is shared. Some of the well known courses of this OCW are Three-Dimensional Modeling, Animation and Rendering using Blender 3D Software, patho-physiology of Infectious Diseases, Medicine, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Zoological Medicine.

7.10 Arxiv.org: It is a project of Cornell University Library & allows open access to 4,74,593 e-prints in Physics, Maths, Computer Sc., Quantitative Biology & Statistics.

7.11 EduCause: EduCause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. Get involved in one of their many initiatives, including the EduCause Learning Initiative (ELI) that supports new collegiate learning environments that use IT to improve the quality of teaching and learning, contain or reduce rising costs, and provide greater access to higher education.

7.12 Global Education & Learning Community (GELC):  GELC embraces open source and Java developers around the globe who share a passion and commitment to contributing to the development of useful, quality code for applications/services that meet the needs of their end users. for the development of useful tools, resources and best practices that help education world wide.

7.13 IBM University Initiative: The IBM University Initiative helps faculty and researchers at higher education institutions worldwide use and implement the latest technology into curriculum and research. By joining, one will gain access to software, hardware, training, course materials, and other tools for academic research and collaboration.

7.14 OpenCourse.org: OpenCourse.org hosts virtual communities that develop, evaluate, and use open, non-proprietary learning objects in their discipline. Collaboration among teachers, researchers and students is welcome with the common purpose of developing open, reusable learning assets (e.g. animations, simulations, models, case studies, etc.). Anyone with an interest in education, collaboration and sharing can join this.

7.15 Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Teaching Online (MERLOT): MERLOT maintains its currency through ongoing and continuing communication with its worldwide supporters in a variety of ways, including the annual MERLOT international conference, the journal of online learning and teaching (JOLT), member publications, and news. The Web site contains leading edge, user-centered, searchable collections of peer reviewed, higher education, online learning materials created by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.

7.16 Open Learning Initiative (OLI): The OLI project, initiated by CarnegieMellon, offers modules based upon crucial elements of instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence. Each module undergoes scrutiny by OLI researchers who conduct a variety of studies to examine the effectiveness and usability of various educational innovations. Some courses are open, others are accessible to students with access codes. These courses are disseminated at no cost to individual students and at low cost to institutions.

7.17 Sofia: The Sofia initiative was launched by Foothill-De Anza CommunityCollege District in March of 2004. The goal of Sofia is to publish community college-level course content and make it freely accessible on the world wide web to support teaching and learning. Quality materials are identified and selected from the submissions through a peer review process. Materials are reviewed for quality, depth, instructional design, completeness, and use of interactivity and multimedia prior to publication. Sofia provides a vehicle for faculty to share their intellectual assets, gain wide recognition for their contribution to their profession, and play a key role in improving equal access to educational materials beyond their classes. Sofia pilot publishes eight open courses on Creative Typography, Elementary Statistics, Physical Geography, Enterprise Network Security, Introduction to Java Programming, Introduction to Macromedia Flash, Musicianship, Webpage Authoring.

7.18 Sakai: Sakai is an online collaboration and learning environment. It was evolved due to merging by learning management systems among Indiana University, the University of Michigan, Stanford, and MIT. Many users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration. Sakai's development model is called "Community Source" because many of the developers creating Sakai are drawn from the "community" of organizations that have adopted and are using Sakai software. The Sakai software includes many of the features common to course management systems, including document distribution, a gradebook, discussion, live chat, assignment uploads, and online testing.

7.19 Research Channel: In cooperation with the University of Washington, Research Channel is developing a laboratory as a testbed to facilitate collaborative investigations into cutting-edge technologies. Having dedicated engineering spaces and high-performance network facilities including 10 Gigabit Ethernet allows Research Channel to more effectively carry out its work of developing, testing and demonstrating media streaming and networking innovations. Recent projects include multipoint low-latency high-definition videoconferencing and live, high-definition video from the seafloor.

7.20 The Open University: The Open University (OU) is the United Kingdom's only university dedicated to distance learning. Through academic research, pedagogic innovation and collaborative partnership, the OU seeks to be a world leader in the design, content and delivery of supported open and distance learning. The latter development process is conducted through the OU's LabSpace, described as "the experimental zone for OpenLearn." LabSpace is designed as a community-led site, primarily for educators, providing a range of online tools to foster the concept of sharing and re-use of materials.

7.21 OER Commons: OER Commons is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and professors from pre-K to graduate school can access their colleagues' course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today's classrooms. It uses Web 2.0 features (tags, ratings, comments, reviews, and social networking) to create an online experience that engages educators in sharing their best teaching and learning practices.

7.22 Connexions: The Connexions open educational resource platform at the Rice University aims at publishing “knowledge chunks” or modules that can be combined and linked to produce custom courses. Connexions is not limited to the content produced within its host institution; instead, anyone can submit contributions that will be peer-reviewed after publication. Connexions is internationally focused, interdisciplinary, and grassroots organized. There are now 3531 modules and 182 courses developed by a worldwide community of authors in fields ranging from computer science to music and from mathematics to biodiversity. Most modules are in English, but there are also modules written in Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai.

7.23 SHERPA: SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research. The main services of SHERPA are RoMEO (publisher's copyright & archiving policies: one can use this site to find a summary of permission that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement), JULIET (research funders archiving mandates and guidelines), Open DOAR (worldwide Directory of Open Access Repositories) & SHERPA Search (simple full-text search of UK repositories).

7.24 Directory of Open Access Repositories (Open-DOAR): Open DOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each Open DOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories. The current directory lists repositories and allows breakdown and selection by a variety of criteria. Open DOAR has also been identified as a key resource for the open access community.

7.25 Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC): It was established in 2006 through collaboration between education ministers of the Commonwealth Heads of Government and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) is an effort to foster a collaborative network for educators in small states in various regions around the world. VUSSC uses a wiki platform to bring together "learning content developers" who are committed to the collaborative development and sharing of free content resources for education. The project was launched in August 2006 with a “boot camp,” with participants from Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Comores, Cyprus, Dominica, the Gambia, Jamaica, Lesotho, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Seychelles, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Swaziland, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

7.26 Open Access News: The open Access News is regarded as news from open access movement. It is a type of blog which consist of more news than comments.

7.27 eXe: The eXe project is developing an off-line authoring environment to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. This open source software project is funded by a grant from the Tertiary Education Commission of New Zealand. eXe supports the definition and modification of pedagogical models through instructional devices, or iDevices. iDevices can be used to package reusable processes or instructional templates. The project is still in early development. The release 0.18 in September 2006 added support for math iDevice and multimedia iDevice, as well as support for Czech, Tagalog, Twi and Ewe languages.

8 CONCLUSION:

The open educational resources, open courseware, repositories and free softwares are demand of the technological era. The price of publishing and printing has been increasing day-by-day and for author as well as publishers both are in hanging situation. Apart from this the reader also faces the price hick and accessibility problems. The concept of open educational resources has emerged as a tool to cope up this situation. In fact it is the true way in fulfillment of right to information for everyone and also information literacy. One should always keep in the mind while developing open educational resources that sustainability should be their. Another aspect of OER should be transformed from Institutional Repositories to Knowledge Repositories. There is still much to be done to raise awareness and implement standards across the OER movement. One more significant step forward in improving access to OER materials and information.

9 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is very much thankful to Dr AL Moorthy, Director, DESIDOC to encourage and provide all necessary support to complete this paper.

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21.  http://www.cec-lor.edu.in/

Table-1

List of Open Educational Resources

INTERNATIONAL
1.	MIT Open Courseware	http://ocw.mit.edu
2.	SOFIA	http://sofia.fhda.edu
3.	JHSPH Open Courseware	http://ocw.jhsph.edu
4.	Tufts Open Courseware	http://ocw.tufts.edu
5.	Utah State University Open CourseWare	ocw.usu.edu/
6.	Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon	http://www.cmu.edu/oli/overview/index.html
7.	Information Management Resource Kit (FAO)	http://www.fao.org/imark
8.	The OCW Consortium	http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
9.	EduCommons	http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/educommons/
10.	Hewlett Foundation	http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER
11.	Howard Hughes Medical Institute	http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/vlabs/
12.	Public Library of Science (PLoS)	www.plos.org/
13.	Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE)	www.montereyinstitute.org/
14.	Commonwealth of Learning	www.col.org/
15.	EduCause	www.educause.edu/
16.	Global Education & Learning Community	https://edu-gelc.dev.java.net/
17.	IBM University Initiative	http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/university/scholars/academicinitiative/
18.	OpenCourse.org	www.opencourse.org
19.	MERLOT	www.merlot.org/
20.	Open LearningInitiative	www.cmu.edu/oli/
21.	Sofia	www.sofia.usra.edu/
22.	Sakai	www.sakaiproject.org/
23.	Research Channel	www.researchchannel.org/
24.	The OpenUniversity	www.open.ac.uk/
25.	OER Commons	www.oercommons.org/
26.	University of Washington	http://onlinelearning.washington.edu/ol/
27.	Open Yale	oyc.yale.edu/
28.	China Open Resources for Education	www.core.org.cn/en/
29.	Fulbright Economics Teaching Program	www.fetp.edu.vn/home.cfm
30.	Japan OpenCourseWare Alliance	www.jocw.jp
31.	ParisTech OpenCourseWare	www.paristech.org/en/etudier_libres.html
32.	Universia Open CourseWare (Spanish/Portuguese)	ocw.universia.net
33.	African Virtual University	www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~univghana/avuproject.htm
34.	Princeton Archive Lectures	http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/
35.	Open2.Net	http://www.open2.net/
36.	Self (Sharing Knowledge about Free Software)	http://www.selfproject.eu/
37.	The Bazaar	http://www.bazaar.org/
38.	WikiEducator	http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page
39.	University of California - San Diego	http://www.ucsd.edu/portal/site/ucsd
40.	University of Notre Dame	http://ocw.nd.edu/
41.	Open Access News	http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
42.	SHERPA RoMEO	http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
43.	E-Science Projects	http://e-science.ox.ac.uk/public
44.	RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)	http://repec.org
45.	Arxiv.org	http://arxiv.org
46.	eXe	http://exelearning.org/.
47.	Connexions	http://cnx.org/
48.	VUSSC	http://www.wikieducator.org/VUSSC.
INDIAN
49.	National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning		http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/
50.	Education Grid		http://www.edugrid.ac.in/
51.	Ekalavya project		http://ekalavya.it.iitb.ac.in/ekalavyaHome.do
52.	Medknow Publications		http://www.medknow.com
53.	E-Gyan Kosh		http://www.egyankosh.ac.in/
54.	CEC Learning Object Repository		http://www.cec-lor.edu.in/
55.	UNESCO- SALIS e-Learning Portal		http://salisonline.org/
56.	NCERT Books Online		http://www.ncert.nic.in/textbooks/testing/Index.htm