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More Universities to Publish Courseware Online
prostoalex writes "After MIT's decision to put the course materials online free of charge, seven other universities expressed similar goals. With the grant from Hewlett-Packard the universities of Washington, Rochester, Toronto, Cornell, Columbia, Ohio State as well as MIT will provide their courses online at a single location. DSpace was launched with a $1.8 million grant from HP. MIT expects to spend about $250,000 annually to maintain and operate the archive. The page is available here." We also have an update on MITs courseware offerings, so read more if you care about such things.
In related news, dchud writes "DSpace, which has been in production use at MIT Libraries since September, is now available under a BSD-style license as version 1.0 at sourceforge. DSpace is a repository for capturing, persisting, and providing access to the digital research output of the MIT community, and will be the long-term archive for OpenCourseWare materials. Now it's available as an institutional repository platform for the rest of the world. See also coverage from the Boston Globe, CNET, and the AP (via NYT, reg req'd)."
Speaking of books online, don't forget about Baen Books, and their free online library: http://www.baen.com/library/ they know that allowing people to sample stuff for free online is good for business. So you can download many of their books, quite legal.The thought is, if you like it you probably want to buy something from the same author (much as it is with music sharing, according to Janis Ian)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Cornell, although not formally endorsing it, has many of it's online course materials already open to the public. Our course-management system called Courseinfo has most course information available to the public.
For a more "mainstream" approach Cornell has also developed Cybertower which is a free service that provides a very multimedia-based (Quicktime based...so get your Crossover plugin for Linux users) glimse into some of the course offerings. (Although Cornell's strong Engineering department is hardly represented, if at all.) I would guess that many schools have resources like this availible...you just have to know where to look. Are there any other good links to course related sites out there?