After working with universities in Zimbabwe and Suriname, I
came to realize that one of the biggest hurdles to education and training is
the cost of commercial study material.
This problem exists not only in developing nations but also in nations such as
the United States. With the encouragement of many in the developing world I
have undertaken to identify means of gathering quality study material from the
open-access world. Both computer science courses I taught in Zimbabwe during
2014-2015 were developed using fully-cited open-access material. I began
developing this approach to course design in 2011. One result is a prototype
Open-Access Meta-Search Engine that has been a great aid to me in my own work,
http://informationanthology.net/Open-Access-Search.html. Expanding this tool to
others’ use is the next step. Would you please take the time to review this
prototype and send comments to me? I dearly need input from professionals on
the design of the site and suggestions for new features that would make your
searches easier. Thank you all very much for taking the time to provide
comments. (An earlier posting on this topic talks about the thinking that led
to this prototype (http://career-winner.blogspot.com/2013/05/openaccess-for-world-wide-education-and.html).
