What is Open Culture and How Does it Work for Teachers and Students? Tips and Tricks

Open Culture is one of the biggest hub of free useful digital resources for education. Started in 2006, Open Culture is on a mission to centralize the best educational content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Since its inception, it has grown massively with lots of useful educational resources. In this post, we will cover how you can use the Open Culture for education?

What is Open Culture?

Open Culture essentially is a list of all educational content available across the internet. As the name suggests Open Culture boasts of resources spanning a wide range of culture and potential subjects for which it can be used. The resources includes audio books, Free Online courses, eBooks, textbooks, videos, language lessons and a vide variety of other resources.

Even after more than 16 years, the site has maintained its original aesthetics without much change.  Unfortunately it makes the navigation a bit difficult to move around and find your educational resource. However, you can signup for the optional email newsletter which collates the new content. The whole site is available for free of cost supported by the advertisement. So if you have an ad blocker running you may be met with a pop-up that asks you politely to consider turning it off so the site can make money to pay its staff and running costs.

How much does Open Culture cost?

Open Culture is available for everyone without any cost – for free. You don’t need to signup for any paid subscription and share your personal details. The site does have advertising to support the service and you will be watching a popup notification to disable your ad blocker.

How does Open Culture work?

You can start using Open Culture Immediately. There is no need to signup or share any personal details. On arriving at the site, just find out the content for your interest and use it.  Once you land on the Open Culture website homepage, you will see a list of potentially useful educational resources along with sub-headings to narrow down your search criteria.

Once you shortlist the resource of your interest, you can simply click on it. You will be navigated away from the Open Culture website to where the resource is hosted.  So, practically there isn’t anything actually on the website itself, just links to other places that offer the content.

Best Open Culture features?

With so many wonderful open educational resources available for use, Open Culture provides you with the following features:

• A vast array of resources for K-12 education and more.
• Large collection of audio and ebooks.
• Vast collection of online courses
• Free Language lessons for language teaching
• Good collection of educational podcasts

As an educator you can use Open Culture to let your students complete the research on a specific topic and submit the findings.

What are the other free Open Educational Resources website where you can get plenty of resources. Please share with us in the comments section below.