The idea to promote the development, use, and reuse of freely available high-quality academic content emerged through careful review of the technology landscape in K-12 and higher education, and was stimulated by our first investment in the area, the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) grant.  The excitement and energy generated by MIT's commitment to make available, for free, extensive materials from all of its courses has been resounding within the U.S., but even more so from developing countries. We seek to extend the concept to other types of higher education institutions.  For example, supporting a high-quality OCW-like effort at the community-college level would provide benchmarks of excellence for similar institutions.

In addition to course materials, we have moved to support other forms of high-quality "open knowledge" materials, including full courses, components of courses such as modules and learning objects, library collections, and research data.  Each area of content contributes unique forms of knowledge and allows for the establishment of quality benchmarks.   The criteria for our support of educational content made freely accessible on the Web is that it must be exemplary and potentially establish new models for organizing and delivering content.  Collectively, these materials might be viewed as a "new public library" in the form of free content.

While the Foundation's investment has resulted in significant positive momentum in the open content field, challenging financial, technological, legal, cultural, and language barriers must still be addressed.  A number of open content projects to address these barriers are under way.  They are creating the infrastructure to facilitate the use of openly available materials by novice as well as technically sophisticated institutions. However, this infrastructure is still in its infancy, and yet-unknown roadblocks may hinder progress.

In universities creating open content materials, legal counsels are scrutinizing intellectual property issues regarding ownership and distribution of faculty-developed materials, which historically have been closely guarded or distributed for financial gain.  Lastly, in developing nations there exists keen interest to contribute to open content materials, both by creating new materials and by adapting content as appropriate to diverse cultural and linguistic settings.  Repositories to support adaptations will need to be created and maintained.  Accordingly, the Foundation's strategy includes investments in organizations and projects that seek to remove impediments to the use and reuse of freely available content worldwide.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has partnered with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a number of open content-related projects, including MIT OCW, JSTOR , a scholarly journal archive, and Ithaka, an umbrella organization under development to promote collections of scholarly work.

Grant Highlights

MIT OpenCourseWare

Open Learning Initiative, Carnegie Mellon University

Open Learning Support, Utah State University

Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets (SOFIA), Foothill-DeAnza Community College District

SAKAI Educational Partners Program

Harvard University Library Open Collections Program

Grant Sites

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a public library, it provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

EduTools is a freely available Web-based resource for decisionmakers in higher education regarding course management systems, student services, web-based courses, and e-learning policies.

Creative Commons seeks to rebuild a healthy public domain by offering creators legal and technical tools for their work.

Connexions is a web-based open-source global environment for creating and sharing free educational material  and is a project of Rice University.