Open Online Courses

OpenCourseWare does not typically provide enough material to support fully online courses. Collections of individual OER and the cMOOCs can feel so unstructured that faculty may have a hard time adapting them for use as online courses. However, there are some organizations that set out to provide open versions of fairly typical online courses - or at least to provide enough content that a normal teacher could build a complete online course.

The Saylor Foundation Links to an external site. provides the most comprehensive catalog of college-level open online courses Links to an external site., with over 300 completed courses and dozens more in development. There are no registrations or fees required to take the courses, and learners can earn a certificate upon completion of each course. Because the Saylor Foundation is not an accredited institution, you cannot earn a college degree or diploma; however, college professors have designed each course so learners will be able to achieve the same learning objectives as students enrolled in traditional college classes.

Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative Links to an external site. provides several full courses as well. These courses provide a number of interactive features and formative assessments, and are offered in a way that makes them easy for faculty to adopt as textbook replacements in their traditional courses. In addition to making courses freely available, CMU OLI also collects course performance data which it uses to improve the courses over time. Check out this great video Links to an external site. about OLI (they've disabled embedding or I would just display it below).

The Open Course Library Links to an external site. in Washington and the Kaleidoscope Open Initiative both focus on community colleges. These projects both aggregate open educational resources into collections somewhere in scope between textbook replacements and fully online courses.

The most comprehensive catalog of K-12 open online courses Links to an external site. is provided by the Open High School of Utah Links to an external site.. Dozens of courses area available, including all the required core courses in math, language arts, science, and social studies for grades 9-12.

HippoCampus Links to an external site. also offers a dozen K-12 open online courses. However, some of the courses are fully copyrighted courses while others are openly licensed. This intermixing can be confusing to users who aren't paying careful attention.