The Open University has been awarded a further $4.45 million grant to support its work to make course materials freely available to anyone in the world. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation approved a bid to enable the OpenLearn website to double the amount of free learning content by April 2008. The website will also have more learning support and collaboration tools to connect learners and educators online.

Professor Andy Lane, Director of OpenLearn, said: “This funding will have a huge impact on the development of the website. Not only will we be able to increase the amount of content we make freely available and make it relevant to the needs of most learners using the site – such as providing more skills-based courses - but we’ll introduce new technologies such as video blogging and wikis and expand the number of interactive and multimedia resources. We’ll also be working with partners in the UK and abroad to extend the use of the free content in more targeted ways.”

OpenLearn launched in October 2006 as part of the Open University. The site publishes cohesive learning objects taken from Open University courses under a Creative Commons licence. This means that users can download and reuse the materials, amending them to suit their purpose and context. The Open University is the United Kingdom’s only university dedicated to distance learning.

Find a list with all the free courses: OpenLearn LearningSpace