Just this summer, IGNOU has launched two different portals, whose richness of material I believe to be unparalleled in the OER world! Similar to the [Indian Institutes of Technology], it has archived its videos on Youtube. With one channel for each “school” within the university (for example School of education, School of social sciences, etc), more than thousand half an hour/hour long videos have been posted. (And some channels only have an introductory video, so it can be surmised that perhaps as much as double the amount will eventually be posted). These videos are from TV programs that have earlier been produced for dissemination through satellite channels and by VHS, and sometimes the quality is a bit poor, but the breadth is spectacular. ...
Most of the videos are in English, which is the common language of higher education in India, but there are also substantial collections in Hindi, especially in the humanities. ...
Not only has IGNOU released a huge slew of very interesting filmed lectures, but they have digitalized and made open access almost all of their teaching materials! We are not talking about curriculum lists and some course PDFs, this is the entire teaching material that a student would encounter, all modules written by IGNOU staff.
They are employing a T-Space repository, and offer over 16,000 documents, most from 10-50 pages long. ...
Most of these documents are scanned PDFs that have been OCRed (you can do full-text search on them, and you can copy and paste text). ...
However, all the material is copyrighted. ...
I am not sure if it’s under Copyright because IGNOU hasn’t considered the options, or whether they made a conscious decision to Copyright it. I would love to find out, and I hope that Creative Commons India could play a role here. ...
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
