MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. The project was announced on April 4, 2001, and uses Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The program was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors. The initiative inspired a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources.
National Science Digital Library (NSDL) of the United States is an open-access online digital library and collaborative network of disciplinary and grade-level focused education providers operated by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. NSDL's mission is to provide quality digital learning collections to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community, both formal and informal, institutional and individual. NSDL's collections are refined by a network of STEM educational and disciplinary professionals. Their work is based on user data, disciplinary knowledge, and participation in the evolution of digital resources as major elements of effective STEM learning.
Wikibooks is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.
Organic synthesis is a branch of chemical synthesis concerned with the construction of organic compounds. Organic compounds are molecules consisting of combinations of covalently-linked hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms. Within the general subject of organic synthesis, there are many different types of synthetic routes that can be completed including total synthesis, stereoselective synthesis, automated synthesis, and many more. Additionally, in understanding organic synthesis it is necessary to be familiar with the methodology, techniques, and applications of the subject.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
Mostafa A. El-Sayed is an Egyptian-American physical chemist, nanoscience researcher, member of the National Academy of Sciences and US National Medal of Science laureate. He is known for the spectroscopy rule named after him, the El-Sayed rule.
Donna J. Nelson is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. Nelson specializes in organic chemistry, which she both researches and teaches. Nelson served as a science advisor to the AMC television show Breaking Bad. She was the 2016 President of the American Chemical Society (ACS) with her presidential activities focusing on and guided by communities in chemistry. Nelson's research focused on five primary topics, generally categorized in two areas, Scientific Research and America's Scientific Readiness. Within Scientific Research, Nelson's topics have been on mechanistic patterns in alkene addition reactions and on Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube (SWCNT) functionalization and analysis, yielding the first COSY NMR spectrum of covalently functionalized SWCNTs in solution. Under America's Scientific Readiness, she focuses on science education and impacting science by considering its communities; this includes classroom innovations and correcting organic chemistry textbook inaccuracies, on ethnic and gender diversity among highly ranked science departments of research universities, and on improving the image and presentation of science and scientists to the public.
Dennis O. Harper is an American educator and the founder of Generation YES, a nonprofit technology education organization founded in 1999. He is an active advocate for the transformative power of technology in education and for student leadership as change agents in schools.
Acid–base extraction is a subclass of liquid–liquid extractions and involves the separation of chemical species from other acidic or basic compounds. It is typically performed during the work-up step following a chemical synthesis to purify crude compounds and results in the product being largely free of acidic or basic impurities. A separatory funnel is commonly used to perform an acid-base extraction.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.
The Global Text Project (GTP) is a not for profit organization dedicated to the creation, translation, and distribution of free open content textbooks over the Internet. It is an open educational resources project focusing on reaching university students mainly in developing countries, where textbooks are often expensive and not affordable. Textbooks are necessary and crucial for higher education, but they are becoming increasingly expensive, even in the United States. Between 1998 and 2014 textbook prices increased by 161 percent. And since 1977, textbook prices in the country have risen 1,041 percent, more than triple the overall rate of U.S. inflation. Two major reasons that could be affecting textbook prices are the constant publication of new editions, and extra material bundled into the textbooks.
An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost.
WestEd is a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization. The organization's mission states, "WestEd, a research, development, and services agency, works with education and other communities to promote excellence, achieve equity, and improve learning for children, youth, and adults."
The CK-12 Foundation is a California-based non-profit organization which aims to increase access to low-cost K-12 education in the United States and abroad. CK-12 provides free and customizable K-12 open educational resources aligned to state curriculum standards. As of 2022, the foundation's tools were used by over 200,000,000 students worldwide.
The Language Resource Center (LRC) Program of the U.S. Department of Education, administered by the International Foreign Language Education Service under Title VI of the Higher Education Act, funds grants to American universities for establishing, strengthening, and operating centers that serve as resources for improving the nation's capacity for teaching and learning foreign languages through teacher training, research, materials development, and dissemination projects.
MERLOT is an online repository and international consortium of institutions of higher education, industry partners, professional organizations, and individuals. MERLOT partners and members are devoted to identifying, peer reviewing, organizing, and making available existing online learning resources in a range of academic disciplines for use by higher education faculty and students.
PhET Interactive Simulations, a project at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a non-profit open educational resource project that creates and hosts explorable explanations. It was founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman. PhET began with Wieman's vision to improve the way science is taught and learned. Their stated mission is "To advance science and math literacy and education worldwide through free interactive simulations."
This outline of open educational resources provides a way of navigating concepts and topics in relation to the open educational resources (OER) movement.
VitalSource Technologies is an education technology and digital content company founded in 1994. The company works with companies, universities, and publishers and resellers, providing digital course materials to users. VitalSource has offices in Raleigh, North Carolina; Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; as well as in England and Australia.
Laura Mary O'Dwyer is a professor of Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics at Boston College known for her work on examining the impact of technology in education, especially science education, and for quantifying outcomes for K-12 student success.
