Founded in the late 1960's to open up the university sector to those who have little access to university education, The Open University now has around 200,000 students studying all over the world and has over two million alumni. The chances are that you know at least one!
Now the OU is continuing its tradition of openness through the
Openlearn Website which has made educational resources, taken from OU courses, freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world with access to the internet. Because the courses are published under a Creative Commons copyright license, users can download, reuse and 'remix' the course material as they choose!
Use of the free resources has attracted a lot of interest from self-motivated learners looking to increase their skills in a range of areas including:
The site is also attracting self-organising groups of learners, educators and organisations who are using the freely available material in ways that best suit their needs.
Openlearn aims to widen participation to higher education by reducing access barriers in the developed and developing worlds, and it is already playing a role in projects like
`Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa’ (TESSA). There are also agreements for the materials to be translated into Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and traditional Chinese.
