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Open University (UK) new website and new units

New website on climate change

OpenLearn has seen over 4.5 million people take advantage of free education since it was launched in October 2006. Now the Open University is launching a new learning website later in 2009. They are looking for people with an interest in climate change to help test the prototype. If you'd like to help out, sign-up here.


New Units on Open Learn

Recent study units include:

Geometry

Numbers

Tapping into mathematics

Diagrams, charts and graphs

Social work learning practice

Meeting minority needs

Homelessness and need

Care transactions

Children's participation

Experiences of assessment

LETS: A community development

Health is everywhere: unravelling the mystery of health

An introduction to biological systematics

Social marketing

Effective ways of displaying information

Managing to meet service users' needs

Becoming a critical social work practitioner

Understanding cardiovascular diseases

Registered users will need to be logged in to access their personal myLearningSpace and use the free learning tools. Non-registered users will need to register. Registration is completely free and makes no future requirements of you. You can find out more information on the Getting Started page

The Open Science Directory

Access to scientific literature is very important for the scientific work in developing countries. As a result of different projects a large collection of e-journals is now available for researchers in developing countries. The number of Open Access Journals is growing steadily as we can see in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Major UNO organizations like WHO, FAO and UNEP have their specific programs for the scientific institutions in low-income countries. Finally a lot of universities, institutes and other organizations are supporting access programs.

All these programs and projects have their own website and/or search engine. IOC/IODE, with the support of EBSCO and Hasselt University Library, is creating a unique access point to all the journals contained in the different programs - the Open Science Directory.


The Goals of the Open Science Directory are:

• To create a global search tool for all open access and special programs journal titles.
• To enhance the access of these collections by creating direct links to the journals and their articlesincluded in this A-to-Z-list.
• All information about the included journal collections is available at the websites of the included projects. These websites are directly accessible from the Open Science Directory.
• The Open Science Directory will not replace these programs. Also the different programs have their own regulations and eligibility conditions. As a interested user, you or your institute will have to register on their sites if you want to make use of special programs like HINARI, AGORA, INASP-PERI, OARE, eIFL and eJDS.

Content:

• About 13000 scientific journals are now available in the Open Science Directory. When all the special program journals are included, the Open Science Directory will contain more than 20000 titles.
• Open Science Directory contains collections of Open Access Journals (e.g. Directory of Open Access Journals) and journals in the special programs (Hinari, Agora, OARE). Other programs will be added in the near future: INASP-PERI, eJDS.

The WWW Explained in Plain English

As an educator, I often need to be able to point people to good, clear explanations of new ICTs. Here's another excellent resource from CommonCraft. In the following video, Lee LeFever gives a short explanation of what makes the World Wide Web work: browsers, packets, servers and links.