Utah State collaborating with MIT on courseware

Black Issues in Higher Education, August 12, 2004 by Ronald Roach

LOGAN, UTAH

Researchers affiliated with the Open Sustainable Learning Opportunity (OSLO) Group at Utah State University have launched the Open Learning Support (OLS) initiative, a program that complements the free Web-based educational materials from MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. The OLS initiative is set up to work with seven MIT courses, but eventually it will work with all of the OCW courses and will invite other free content providers to participate.

Making the announcement, OSLO director Dr. David Wiley said the pilot launch of OLS promotes software that integrates with OCW materials to allow learners to connect with each other, form study groups and receive support for using OCW materials in formal and informal educational settings. Open Learning Support is funded by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Since April 2001 when MIT president Dr. Charles M. Vest announced that MIT would make the materials for nearly all its courses freely available on the Internet with the OCW project, a few universities have contributed to the MIT effort or have developed their own open source learning projects.

The OLS software is open source. For more information visit: .