Open Content means that the material is published in a format that explicitly allows the copying and/or modifying of the information. Content can be either in the public domain or under a license like the Creative Commons Licenses

Open Content is a contradiction to the traditional restricted copyright licenses. For publishers it is a way to keep in control of their own creative works.

This article about Open-Of-Course was published on the Free Software Magazine. It comes under a creative commons license so you are free to publish it wherever you like as long as you respect this: this license

A free education: Open-Of-Course

By Tim Cowlishaw

Attempts to educate and evangelise to people about the benefits of free software are often frustrasted by the common perception that free software is made 'by geeks, for geeks' and is therefore of limited interest to a less 'technical' audience.

The Free Culture movement, Wikipedia, and, to a certain extent the Creative Commons (along with applications such as flickr that integrate their licenses) have helped dispel this myth, applying the principles of freedom that originated in Free Software to a wider variety of content, beginning an influx of these values into a wider cross-section of society. Open-Of-Course is another project that attempts to do the same thing, this time providing a repository for freely licensed and collaboratively produced learning materials for a variety of disciplines.

Unlike initiatives such as MIT's OpenCourseWare project, Open-Of-Course intends to provide teaching and information for practical subjects and activities, rather than theoretical and academic disciplines. By providing courses in diverse, yet immediately relevant disciplines, Open-Of-Course showcases the possibilities that free licensing offers for education and dissemination of knowledge at a grass-roots level.

Read the whole article here

You are welcome to join us and publish your own free and open content course or tutuorial at Open-Of-Course.

Your benefits:

Free exposure for you or your business:
Open-Of-Course started only some months ago and attracted this month (november) already over 10.000 visitors. We now have almost a 1000 registered users from all over the world and registration is only open scince a month. But there is more.. by setting your information free under a creative commons license it can be published everywhere but it still will carry your name..

Communicate with your students:
As a course developer you have the opportunity to communicate with your students through our open learning environment.

Create opportunities for others
By setting your information free, you help people that normally would not have access to this kind of educational information.

My interest for open and free content originates from my love for open source en free software. What appeals most to me is not that it is free but the aspect of freedom.

Scince I am not a nerd at all, an other very important thing for me is that the software that I use is safe and user-friendly. I dropped out of Windows years ago because of all the safety-, virus- and spyware problems and then switched to Macintosh. Working with that was a relief but then I discovered open source software. I came across some great free and open source programs and decided to give it a try.

Now I use Firefox for browsing, Thunderbird for e-mail and Joomla and Moodle for my websites and I am very happy with them. I also changed my operating system OSX for Ubuntu Linux. Not because I did not like OSX but because I like free software even better.