The Open University of Israel launched their OCW in March, with plans to publish course materials and more than 250 complete textbooks. Here is their announcement:

OCW at the Open University of Israel: free public access to on-line academic digital books and study materials

The Open University of Israel (OUI) is the largest university and academic publisher in Israel. With more than 40,000 students, it offers 650 courses in all major disciplines, and prints over a million copies of its textbooks annually. The university has a robust Hebrew-based home-grown LMS and it offers a rich variety of on-line learning models, including Web 2.0 applications. We use a hybrid (or blended) pedagogical model (Bonk, 2006) which combines distance a-synchronous tutoring with face-to-face sessions, some by video broadcasting to study centers and to students’ homes via their broadband web access.

In May 2008 the OUI launched the “Pe’er” OCW project (in Hebrew: “Opening Treasures of the Mind”, http://ocw.openu.ac.il/), with the intention to give free and open access to its learning materials and to a selected collection of its books. The project is was funded by the Rothchild Foundation and is conceptually similar to the OU-UK’s OpenLearn and to MIT’s OCW projects. The unique aspect of the OUI’s endeavor is the conversion of full titles from print to e-books and to audio books (in MP3 format). We began with 10 titles and will be opening more than 250 of our textbooks in 50 different courses to be freely available on-line. Many of the titles are supplemented by video lectures by the course designers or by other experts.

Additionally, the course core materials will be supplemented by reusable learning objects prepared by the teaching staff at OUI, like on-line quizzes, lecture summaries, presentations, dictionaries, and video-recordings of live sessions. The different items that will be made available to students and the to the general public, in the spirit of OCW. The Open University requires user registration in order to be able to assess public usage and user profiles. Our vision is to enable users to access OUI learning materials on mobile platforms and to add translated versions of the courses, initially in Arabic and Russian, for potential international audience.