Used MIT’s OpenCourseWare before? Even if you have not, you would probably know about MIT’s initiative to "…put all of the educational materials from MIT’s undergraduate and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the year 2007." MIT’s initiative has been followed by quite a number of universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University and Tufts University.

But the UK has finally come in with a similar initiative, or at least, just the UK’s Open University, known as the Open Content Initiative. Sponsored by the same foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Open Content Initiative is set to put up most, if not all, of the Open University’s course materials online.

However, we’re not going to see this in public hands for a few months, with a live launch scheduled for October 2006. IMHO, if the OCI is anywhere the equal of MIT’s OCW initiative, I’d be pretty happy. For the past couple of months, I’ve been browsing through some of the economics-related material available through the OpenCourseWare Finder (a search engine of sorts for many of the OCW-enabled universities), and they’ve been good for free stuff.