There is a growing movement among colleges and universities around the world to provide online open access to much of their curriculum. For example, in 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu) with the plan to make virtually all the school’s courses available for free online. MIT OpenCourseWare is “a publication of the course materials that support the dynamic classroom interactions of an MIT education; it is not a degree-granting or credit-bearing initiative.” 1 A short video about this can be found on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT). Interestingly enough, one of the main speakers in the video, Prof. Dick Yue, is a former refugee.
This initiative comes out of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org), a “collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.”2
More recently, Youtube has been developing partnerships with universities and colleges, and has gathered education-related video channels under the bannerYouTube EDU (http:www.youtube.com/edu).
As these initiatives continue to develop, the RRN is committed to sourcing out and making available free refugee and forced migration related online courses as part of its commitment to promoting Open Source, Open Access to research and learning.
MIT Online Course Materials
Anthropology
Violence, Human Rights and Justice
Health Sciences and Technology
Designing and Sustaining Technology Innovation for Global Health Practice
Political Science
Great Power Military Intervention
Ethnicity and Race in World Politics
Special Programs
Urban Studies and Planning
Disaster, Vulnerability and Resilience