This monthly newsletter focuses on the various open source projects going on in the world, calling attention to a different open source project each month. Our objective at Alt Choice Tech Advisers is to increase the exposure of these projects in the business community. We hope these resources will be of great benefit to both your individual business and the community as a whole.
This Month’s Open Source Project:
Open Culture
Imagine being able to get up to 1,300 free online courses from the world’s leading universities, such as Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford and more. Well, this dream is now a reality made possible by the Open Culture project. The Open Culture project is a free cultural and educational media site on the Internet. The project was founded in 2006 by Dan Coleman, who is the Director and Associate Dean of Stanford University’s Continuing Education Program.
Through their site, Open Culture offers free audio books, eBooks and online courses. You can download hundreds of free audio books to your MP3 player or computer, covering a wide range of works. They offer fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. They have eBooks by Twain, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Orwell, Vonnegut, Nietzsche, Austen, Shakespeare, Asimov and more.
Objective
To bring together high-quality cultural and educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community and to centralize the world’s academic content, curate it, and give everyone access whenever and wherever they want, making academic learning accessible to everyone.
Goals
To find and organize free, high quality, academic media in a central location where it can be accessed freely by everyone in the world, irrespective of their cultural or economic background.
Solution
To achieve this goal, the Open Culture project built a web site dedicated to bringing free educational media to users worldwide. The project searched the Internet for quality educational materials in various media formats, residing in different database, and curated this high-value educational information and made it accessible to everyone on their website. Their website is akin to a blog, with multiple posts that make the front page every day. Each post provides a bite-sized taste of what the website has to offer. The user interface makes it easy to browse their resources, which touch nearly every knowledge base out there. Audiobooks, movies and college courses are also offered, free of charge. While the textbooks seem to be available online only, everything else is available for download.
The free online courses provided by Open Culture are from Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford and others. You can download these audio and video courses straight onto your computer or MP3 player. Some courses even offer “certificates” or “statements of completion.”
Considering the quality and usefulness of these resources, and the user-friendly website design, the Open Culture project is an incredibly useful resource for teachers, students, self-access learners and SAC facilitators or counselors. It also has links to other Internet resources and social networking sites, allowing learners to share interesting materials with their colleagues and peers.