OpenCourseWare refers to course materials created by educators, content experts and universities, to be shared freely on the Internet. The materials include anything from ebooks, lectures, podcasts and videos. Based on the notion that knowledge and information want to be free, these resources offer incredible content and value.

Middle and High school teachers will find the sites below to be the most valuable for providing course content to supplement their subjects. They will also find on many of these sites opportunities to contribute content and expertise.

Curriki - Curriki's mission is to provide free, high-quality curricula and education resources to teachers, students and parents around the world

CK12.org - CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide.

HippoCampus - HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). The goal of HippoCampus is to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge.

Connexions - ...a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute.

Schmoop (optimized for mobile devices) -Shmoop will make you a better lover (of literature, history, life). See many sides to the argument. Find your writing groove. Understand how lit and history are relevant today. We want to show your brain a good time.

WikiTeach - This lesson plan wiki is for teachers who want to share their lessons with others. Think of it as a Wikipedia of instructional content.

OER Commons (Open Educational Resources) - OER Commons forges alliances between trusted content providers and creative users and re-users of Open Educational Resources (OER).

The links below will take you to university offerings. While you won't receive university credits for taking these courses, you won't pay for them either.

MIT OpenCourseWare from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative Carnegie Mellon University
Notre Dame OpenCourseWare Notre Dame University
Open Yale Courses Yale University
Tufts OpenCourseWare Tufts University
Academic Earth offering video courses from leading universities
Scitable A collaborative learning space for science

To learn more about OpenCourseWare visit the Open CourseWare Consortium