A New Outlet for Open Courseware

A new Web portal promises to provide free open courseware to the public from an international group of institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a nonprofit group known as China Open Resources for Education. The portal was announced Wednesday at the World Summit on the Information Society, and was sponsored by Development Gateway Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This, along with a $900,000 grant offered by Hewlett to African teachers, is meant to provide university-quality course materials online to educators and students who might not normally have access to such courseware.