Higher Ed Utah

PARIS — A computer in Logan, Utah, holds syllabus details, lecture notes, problem sets and exams from more than 80 Utah State University courses: but this is no secret cheat-sheet site put together by rogue hackers and pirates. Anyone, anywhere, with an Internet connection — from Bill Gates down — can log on and download these materials without cost. The site, Utah State OpenCourseWare, http://ocw.usu.edu, is part of the OpenCourseWare network, itself part of an educational resources movement dedicated to opening and reshaping global access to higher education.

Since 2000, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established the first OpenCourseWare site, schools — including top names like Harvard and Stanford in the United States and Oxford and Cambridge in Britain — have been releasing educational materials to the public through platforms that include iTunes U, youtube.com/edu and their own sites, like Open Yale Courses.

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