What is OpenCourseWare and "open education" or "open courseware"?

The concept of sharing educational resources freely around the world, referred to as "open education" or "open courseware", is now gaining mainstream acceptance both inside and outside of the academy and has been adopted by over 200 higher education institutions worldwide.   According to the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW), open education has three main advantages: access and distribution of knowledge to regions of the world where higher education is not readily available; recruitment and retention of students, as well as curriculum development and research collaboration among faculty; and sustainability of interest in and access to higher education.
Within NYU's YouTube presence, you can access all of the NYU Open Education courses as well as hundreds of video uploads, featuring speakers, class events, topic discussions, and faculty interviews from around the University.http://www.nyu.edu/academics/open-education.html

sites with free courses
http://podcast.ucsd.edu/
http://www.uctv.tv/ ( University of California Television)
http://cs50.tv/2010/fall/ (Harvard Computer Science)
http://www.coursera.org/landing/hub.php (Coursera)

Harvard Open Open Learning Initiative

http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative