About the University
Scientia omnibus patet — knowledge lies open to all. It already does; we simply act like it.
The idea
The best university teaching in the world stopped being scarce years ago. MIT publishes its courses; so do Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, and a long tail of teachers whose free lectures outclass most paid degrees. What never became free is the thing wrapped around the courses: the structure. Knowing what to take, in what order, with which prerequisites, and how much work it will honestly be.
The Open University provides exactly that structure and nothing else. Faculties, registrar codes, prerequisite chains, workload estimates in ECTS credits, and programmes of study that sequence open courses into a coherent education — from first derivative to the research frontier.
What we will never do
We do not rehost course materials, sell certificates, or run advertisements. Courses are linked at their canonical homes, and the scholarship's credit stays with the institutions and teachers who made it free. We are not affiliated with The Open University (UK) or any accredited institution — we award no degrees, only a path worth walking.
Contributing
The entire curriculum is a set of plain text files in a public GitHub repository — every course a Markdown file, every programme a YAML file. To propose a course, contest a prerequisite, correct a workload estimate, or argue for a new faculty, open a pull request. Admission to the faculty senate is a merged PR.
Licensing
Our course descriptions, programme designs, and site content are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The linked courses carry their own licences — most commonly CC BY-NC-SA for OpenCourseWare — noted on each course's registrar record.
Matriculation
Matriculation is open — and passwordless by principle. Your email receives a six-digit code or sign-in link; we store no password, ever, because we never ask for one. Matriculated students keep a Transcript of Records: courses recorded as complete, with their ECTS credit, wherever you study from.
What comes next
The examination hall: an online judge with problem sets keyed to the catalogue — starting with CS 220 — so an algorithms course here ends the way it should: with your solutions, graded.