about education with expert colleagues. The site is organized by discipline and anyone can use it for free. At the moment, it has more than 22,500 resources.
As indicated above, there is growing interest in and development of OER initiatives in other parts of the world. For example, in China, 451 courses have been made available by 176 university members of the China Open Resources for Education (CORE) consortium. CORE is also involved in translating these courses into English as part of its Chinese Quality Open Courseware (CQOCW) project (see http://ocw.core.org.cn/CORE).
In Japan 1,500 courses have been made available by universities participating in the Japanese OCW Consortium (www.jocw.jp) of which 1,285 are in Japanese and 212 are in English. In France, over 2,000 educational resources from around 200 teaching units have been made available by twelve member universities of the ParisTech OCW project (www.paristech.fr/en)
There are also similar HE OER initiatives based in the United Kingdom (UK). One such example is JORUM (www.jorum.ac.uk), which is a free online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK Further and Higher Education Institutions. The JorumOpen collection contains a variety of resources, including OER that are freely available to all. The focus is on helping to build a community for the sharing, reuse and repurposing of learning and teaching materials.
There are also projects underway to make OCW materials available in multiple languages, including Universia's Spanish and Portuguese translations (http://ocw.universia.net/en). This site contains Spanish and Portuguese OCW from over 90 participating institutions. CORE is also involved in providing simplified Chinese translations. In addition, some OCW institutions such as John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are using Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS), a program that translates educational resources into Chinese. OOPS has replicated the School's OCW site in simplified Chinese and in traditional Chinese.
In India, a number of institutions are also digitizing their course materials and a good number of open courseware have been established.
The Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC) is an inter-university centre on electronic media, established by the University Grants Commission (UGC). CEC's Learning Object Repository (LOR) houses educational resources in different subjects such as Archaeology, Biology, Botany, Chemistry, Commerce, Computer Science, Economics, Education, English and Fine Arts.
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