OpenCourseWare, Education 2.0

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived 2nd generation of Web-based services - such as social networking sites (namely Myspace/YouTube/Digg/Wiki), emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. [Wikipedia]

The idea behind this is to share and improve a product or idea so that the maximum number of people would be able to benefit from it. There are tons of open source software on the web today(e.g. Firefox and Wordpress). Many of the open source programs are becoming very popular and the force that drive behind them are the countless plugin and upgrades created by different developers all over the world.

I have recently found out there is an open source education site that has the same principal. OpenCourseWare (OCW) has a wide selection of course material from different universities around the world (China, Colombia, France, Japan, Netherlands, UK, US, etc.). All of these courseware is available for all to use and openly licensed for redistribution.

The organization began with MIT OpenCourseWare, an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from MIT's undergraduate and graduate courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere.