Open Courseware, and Open Access Education are a means of obtaining training materials from accredited universities and other sources on-line.

Many universities and colleges routinely publish their courseware under a Creative Commons Licence. This license permits you to share, distribute and transmit the work, and also to remix it providing that you use it for non-commercial purposes.

The works being distributed are not shoddy works produced as bait to entice you to study with specific institutions. They are the exact course materials that enrolled students use for their studies.

This means that students in Ghana, Vietnam, or Timbuktu, via Internet access, may download course materials from institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Tufts, Notre Dame, and a host of other colleges operating Open Courseware policies.

In addition to university courses some training providers also provide free materials on-line. There are directories listing such providers so you are able to sample materials prior to committing to a career, or course of action.

Open Access Education, and particularly Open Courseware is not without controversy. Many academics think that in some way an electronic document carries less weight than one printed in an academic journal. This concern is shared by the publishers of traditional paper journals who naturally worry that the dissemination of free information electronically will result in people un-subscribing from print journals.

Fortunately not all publishers are so narrow minded. The Directory Of Open Access Journals cites hundreds of journals with articles freely available in PDF format. Open access journals are published in a number of languages including English, Spanish and Portuguese. They cover a range of topics.

The Family Business School will make available Open Courseware where we are satisfied that these may stand alone in providing relevant and useful information to our visitors. Some course materials, however, are specifically designed for face-to-face dissemination in a supervised settings, or form a part of on-line tutored material, and therefore will not be released as Open Courseware.