SKILLEDUP.COM launches OpenU - Over 850 Open Education Resources

NEW YORK - March 14, 2013 - PRLog -- To help contribute to the rapidly growing community of open learners, SkilledUp.com today launched the OpenU (http://www.skilledup.com/learn/openu/show-all/) hub, featuring over 850 educational resources carefully curated from a myriad of sources. The resources include: MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses); open courses made available on university websites, YouTube or iTunes; textbooks; as well as other unique resources for K-12 students. SkilledUp’s OpenU represents one of the highest-quality collections of open education resources on the web.

As we celebrate Open Education Week, the US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan recently expressed his support for open educational resources, “OER can help us bring the best K-12 teachers and college professors and most cutting edge course and teaching methods within the reach of every single motivated student.”  

However, Duncan also recognized a key problem with OER: “Despite the promise of this new approach, not enough people know about open educational resources and their tremendous transformational promise.”

“Our goal was to put in one place what was previously in a hundred different places. With all the talk of MOOCs, some students might not realize that over 500 courses are available online today, and don’t have specific enrollment periods or waitlists,” said Nick Gidwani, founder of SkilledUp.com.

Although MOOCs tend to get most of the attention, their offerings are still relatively small in number, and some have a number of restrictions, including requiring enrollment during specific windows. There are hundreds of open courses in areas like Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science and Engineering that have been published by universities like Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT.

“We’ve put together the most complete, single place on the web to access the best college and K-12 open education resources, and we will continue to update and refine the collection,” said Gidwani.

SkilledUp.com is the best place to find and compare online courses (http://courses.skilledup.com), with over 50,000 courses from over 200 providers. The majority of courses help individuals to gain skills in areas like Programming, Graphic Design and Marketing, although users can also find E-books, talks and lectures, and MOOCs.

SkilledUp’s mission is to organize, curate and review the world of online education, to help anyone to make informed decisions about their educational options.

This year is the second ever Open Education Week, which is coordinated by the OpenCourseWare Consortium, and runs from March 11 – 15, 2013.