Open courseware and Open Educational Resources started as an idea and a vision and, over the course of a decade, have morphed in to a Worldwide effort to bring free, high-quality educational materials to the masses.

The OER Timeline

1998
This whole story begins with a guy named David Wiley who first coined the term “open content” and also developed one of the first open licenses for non software, forging the path for the Creative Commons movement. David is also the director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning which, among other things, is the group that develops and maintains the eduCommons publishing platform.

2000
MIT proposes OCW to help them in the pursuit of their mission of advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship around the world. MIT plans to make all of their courses available for free online.

2001
Creative Commons is founded in Massachusetts with the goal of providing a sliding scale of licenses that range from full copyright protection to works in the public domain. Creative Commons licenses also allowed content authors to retain original copyright of their work while still allowing it to be used in a manner that they decide.

2002
UNESCO sponsors the Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries which used the term Open Educational Resources to describe their efforts to a create a universal educational resource for all of humanity. Pretty lofty goals, if you ask me.

2003
MIT Open Courseware is officially launched with 500 courses and three language translations.

2005
With open courseware gaining steam, MIT and other educational institutions formed the Open Courseware Consortium. The OCW’s main goals were to promote the use and expansion of open courseware and other open educational resources around the World and to develop sustainable models for publishing such materials.

2006 and Beyond
The open courseware movement continues to grow and pick up steam with universities around the World adopting this open standard for education. Here is a list of active OCW projects in the United States:

• Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Tufts University
• UMass Boston
• University of California, Irvine
• University of Notre Dame
• Utah State University
• University of California, Berkley