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OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare, or OCW, are courses, generally college courses, published on the internet for free. The concept has existed since the late 90's when a German university published some of its lectures online. In 2002, MIT followed suit. Many of these, particularly MIT's current offerings are simply lecture notes or recordings of lectures, sometimes augmented with handouts, exercises (sometimes without solutions), quizzes/exams (usually without solutions), etc. Others involve a set of lectures designed for the web, known as massive open online course, or MOOCs. MOOCs are generally more synchronous, students sign up (though they can do so fairly anonymously), and instructors are more directly involved, though the number of students may be in the tens of thousands. Technically, MOOCs and OCW are overlapping sets. Many OCW courses are neither designed for the web nor do they involve any support, at the same time, a MOOC need not be freely available for reuse (openly licensed/copyleft) and need not be free (gratis). Together they form a major group of open educational resource.
