Here at the Saylor Foundation, our mission is to make education freely available to all. Our primary focus is curating college-level courseware and making these courses freely available on www.saylor.org. However, we also want to ensure that individuals – students, professors, and anyone interested in polishing his or her knowledge in various subject areas – can access our resources through a multitude of websites so they can enhance their studies or remix and reuse our courses in an effort to drive down costs for students. As such, we’ve begun making Saylor.org courses and resources available on websites outside of www.saylor.org.
Saylor Archivist, Sean Connor, has been leading the effort to make these resources widely available. We chatted about his work in the area, and here’s what he has to say:
“Open resources are meant to be shared! Potential learners can find out about Saylor.org’s resources from repositories such as OER Commons and MERLOT. Late last year, we worked with OER Commons staff to upload information about our complete courses; in January, with kind assistance from MERLOT staff, we uploaded data for 212 of our completed courses. These popular repositories provide entries with keywords, brief descriptions, links, and other useful details for our courseware, allowing people to discover our work while searching for other OER materials as well. In the coming months, we plan to expand our contributions to include additional repositories and more specific learning content (original video, notes, and newly-open textbooks).”
The additional areas Sean is referring to include, among others, Connexions, where we plan to post the four textbooks that were recently relicensed under CC-BY as a result of our Open Textbook Challenge.
By widely sharing our resources, we hope that more individuals who’re looking to gain knowledge come across them, and that educators will find and remix them as needed for their own classrooms – and, most importantly, help drive down the costs for their students.
Know of a great repository that might be an ideal location for Saylor.org courses? Let us know by leaving a comment below!
I don’t know if you’ve contacted the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) but they might be interested! You can see their list of available courses at http://www.montereyinstitute.org/nroc/nrocdemos.html.
Their courseware is among the material available at Hippocampus, at http://www.hippocampus.org/ who seem to use other projects’ course materials as well. Good luck!