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The OCL offers free or low-cost materials for 81 of the highest-enrolled courses at the 34 community and technical colleges in the state of Washington (United States).

Released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, anyone, anywhere, can use, customize and distribute the course materials. Some of the OER are paired with low cost textbooks ($30 or less), but many of them are completely free. Subjects range from biology and math to English and US history.

The Washington State Faculty Association of Community and Technical Colleges (FACTC) passed a resolution in 2012 endorsing the ideal of open educational resources on economic, educational, and moral grounds.

Funded by the Washington State Legislature and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Course Library joins the growing movement for open educational resources (OER), setting a strong example by requiring that all materials created through the programme be openly licensed to the public to freely use, adapt and distribute.

According to an analysis released by the Student PIRGs, the OCL has saved Washington's students $5.5 million to date. Students who take OCL courses save $96 on average.

ICORE is a non-profit and requires no membership fees to join. Open to both representatives of organisations as well as individuals, it aims to promote open research and open education as a fundamental social objective. This promotion of these goals will be accomplished through the fostering of collaboration between relevant stakeholders in open research and education, such as national, European and international policy makers, researchers, educators of all levels, students, non-profit  educational providers as well as commercial educational providers, among others.

The association's activities will include the administration of an online community portal for information exchange, the organisation of scientific and educational events (conferences, summer schools, etc.) and the establishment of creative partnerships between ICORE members to advance open research and open education internationally.  

Interested applicants can register easily at the ICORE website, where the complete first public draft of the association’s statutes can also be found. Joining before the first official meeting of ICORE on May 15 allows new members to be recognized as co-founders.

The MOOC was taught by renowned expert Alberto Cairo between January and March 2013, as part of the Knight Center’s new MOOC initiative, which began in October last year with the first edition of the infographics course and counted with the participation of 2,000 people from 109 countries.

"As far as we know, this was the first MOOC on journalism in the world," said professor Rosental Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center. "This first MOOC was an experiment and I can now say that it was a big success. We proved the concept and now we are preparing several other MOOCs on journalism topics.”

Professor Alves said that about half of the participants were engaged in the discussion forums. "The fact that 2,214 people interacted in the forums of the course is really a good indicator of the effectiveness of the MOOC," he said.

“People from more than 100 countries have participated in this MOOC. We've had journalists, designers, scientists, economists, statisticians, developers, etc. This fact has made the course much richer and more engaging. It would not have been so interesting if the student body were not so diverse,” wrote instructor Alberto Cairo in his final message to the class.

The Knight Center’s pioneering MOOC programme has been designed especially for this new, massive format and seeks to encourage the largest amount of student-to-student and instructor-to-students interactions as possible. On March 8 the Knight Center launched its first MOOC in Spanish, "How to Improve Electoral Coverage."

The Declaration marks a historic moment in the growing movement for Open Educational Resources (OER) and calls on governments worldwide to openly license publicly funded educational materials for public use.

The Declaration recommends UNESCO member States to:

1. Foster awareness and use of OER.
2. Facilitate enabling environments for use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).
3. Reinforce the development of strategies and policies on OER.
4. Promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks.
5. Support capacity building for the sustainable development of quality learning materials.
6. Foster strategic alliances for OER.
7. Encourage the development and adaptation of OER in a variety of languages and cultural contexts.
8. Encourage research on OER.
9. Facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing of OER.
10. Encourage the open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds.

UNESCO proposed with all relevant stakeholders to design and implement a series of global activities based on all the 10 points of the Declaration. This project aims to assist Member States in developing national-level OER policies and implementing the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (ICT CFT) by harnessing Open Educational Resources (OER).

The Inception Meeting of the "Implementing the Paris OER Declaration" project took place on 26 and 27 March, 2013 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.