Open Source Educational Content & Courseware

Also See: Virtual Online Schools which lists free courses from colleges.

Online Textbooks and Content

OpenCourseWare Consortium is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.

Open Educational Resources Commons is a new online content resource center, by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), will make more than 8,000 classroom materials available to teachers and learners worldwide, at no cost. OER Commons is a comprehensive network for open education resources, combining content with extensive social networking. Educators and learners add tags, ratings, reviews, and comments to help others in schools and on campuses quickly find what they are looking for and to encourage others to share their ratings and reviews.

Open Education Portal is for anyone who wants to find, use, create or distribute open educational resources. The OEP is for colleges and high-schools, secondary and primary schools, homeschools and community groups, teachers and parents, students and life-long learners. Browse guest accessible courses and homepages, or create your own account to really put the OEP to work for you.

Curricki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Our mission is to improve education around the world by empowering teachers, students and parents with user-created, open source curricula.

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. HippoCampus was designed as part of Open Education Resources (OER), a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education for everyone. HippoCampus content has been developed by some of the finest colleges and universities in the world and contributed to the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC).

Wired article on ELGG, an opensource social networking cms environment for schools

Western Governors University
You might also check out University of the People using all open courses. People get together in groups to study, then pay only for the exam. Payment is on a sliding scale based on your country. For example, if you live in Bangladesh, you might pay very little compared to someone from a more developed country.