What is OpenCourseWare?
Excerpt from wikipedia
OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. The OCW movement began at MIT with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare in October 2002. Since then, a number of universities have created OCW projects, some of which have been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation one of which being Yale University.

According to the website of the OCW Consortium, an OCW project:

* is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.
* is available for use and adaptation under an open license.
* does not typically provide certification or access to instructors.

Why this group?
While OCW already has lots of courses and universities participating, there is lack of useful courseware that would help students interested in open source technologies. This is understandable given that open source is mostly community lead in sort of an unstructured continuously evolving way. However, we think that this gap is worthwhile to fill and looking for all of interested folks who can help with ideas, contributions to come up with structured courseware on open source technologies and concepts that can be considered for submission to OCW. At a broad level the courseware is excepted to cover

1. A broad introduction to the topic with detailed lessons covering 6-8 sessions of classroom teaching material
2. A set of individual projects that students are expected to work on individually and submit over a period of 1 week
3. A set of comprehensive projects that would cover the concepts introduced in the course which the students can deliver in groups of 2-3 over a period of 3-4 weeks
4. Suggested evaluation criteria for Faculty
5. A list of open source projects that the students can consider contributing to once they are through with the course.

A good example would be the courseware on Laboratory in Software Engineering at MIT

If this interests you or you have been already working on this, welcome you to join the group and check out the discussion forums.