Tufts University is a leader in the Open Educational Resources (OER) progress, bringing access to learning content, tools, and infrastructure to educators, students, and self-learners. As a leading university with a dedication to internationalism, dynamic citizenship, and leadership in the health sciences and environment, Tufts offers free access to high class information to maintain the learning efforts of individuals around the world. Open distribution of information, predominantly to get better global health with partners in the developing world, is a vital part of Tufts' task. We encourage you to travel around these resources.
Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK)
Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase, or TUSK, is a complete, open-source-based content and knowledge management software system, predominantly appropriate for generating, organizing and sharing health sciences curricula. TUSK permits each participating institution (several in the United States, India, and East Africa) to sustain their own content repository, curriculum management, and curriculum delivery across all departments and schools using one integrated system that is personalized to their "brand", while enabling sharing content and processes with others. TUSK offers a single, affluent interface for learners, faculty, and curriculum administration. Using the consistent vocabulary of the National Library of Medicine's UMLS keywords and key concepts within its metadata, TUSK enables easy searching and reuse of materials across all disciplines. TUSK offered the infrastructure and much content for Tufts OCW.
The Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) mission is a web-based publication of learning material from Tufts University courses from all three campuses, with a strong demonstration of medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, and nutrition courses. Under the Creative Commons license, the website provides open sharing of free, searchable course content to educators, students, and self-learners throughout the world.
Child & Family Web Guide (CFWG)
The CWFG has been helping parents, students and professionals looking for reliable information about children from infancy to adulthood. With nearly 1 million visitors annually (>20% international), the CFWG ranks hundreds of open sites based on a thorough estimation system developed by leading child development experts, and is maintained by a team of doctoral, masters, and undergraduate students under faculty supervision. CFWG's "seal of approval" appears on many prestigious child and family-oriented websites, as well as universities.
Selected Patient Information Resources in Asian Languages (SPIRAL)
SPIRAL is initially a joint proposal in 2001 of South Cove Community Health Center (Boston) and Tufts University Hirsh Health Sciences Library, currently is used in over 126 countries and territories. SPIRAL aims to encourage health literacy by providing open access to high-quality health information for underserved non-English speakers and their health providers, searchable by the language of the community served, including Chinese, Cambodian/Khmer, Vietnamese, Hmong, Thai, Korean, Laotian, and Japanese.
Visual Understanding Environment (VUE)
The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a free, open resource application developed through a scheme based at Tufts University. VUE is a concept- and content-mapping application, developed to support teaching, learning and research and for any person who needs to access and arrange digital information.
The benefits of concept mapping as a learning tool have been documented by over 40 years of cognitive science research. VUE offer a concept-mapping interface, which can be used as such, or as a way to aggregate and present digital content in non-linear ways. As the accessibility of digital information continues to enhance, VUE sets itself separately as a flexible tool to help incorporate, organize and contextualize electronic content from numerous worldwide sources.
With a particular tool in hand, scholars can use VUE to work throughout an entire academic mission cycle: brainstorm, search, collect, organize, analyze and present information. Some of VUE's exclusive functionality includes federated searches, data import and visualization, map-to-slide presentation, linear and non-linear presentations, connectivity analysis, merge maps, and an upcoming SEASR and Zotero integration.
Perseus has discovered both the possibilities and challenges of moving libraries online into a dynamic, networked world. Perseus offers the most complete collected works of content and tools to teach and learn Greco-Roman classics (particularly Greek, Latin, and Art and Archaeology) as well as other humanities, together with early modern English and customized reading support for the Arabic language. Perseus continues to develop, performing vigorous research in how we access and use information to learn, thus working towards its most important objective of offering the widest range of source materials - linguistic, physical artifacts, historical spaces - as accessible as possible to every human being, regardless of linguistic or cultural environment.
Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO)
The Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) is a leader in supporting efforts to incorporate engineering into K-12 education. The CEEO is comprised of staff, graduate, and undergraduate students to teach science, technology, engineering, and math using the engineering design method as a learning vehicle. Our inspiration stems from our essential belief that the skills we help students build up are closely connected to the conversion of our physical world into a world with improved excitement for learning and higher value of life.
The TDL supports the teaching and research mission of the university by creating access to a increasing compilation of open access digital resources produced and developed at Tufts. The TDL user interface provides inventive metadata and full-text searching tools to discover and view these resources which comprise collections of nationwide and local interest. Precise Collections of note in the TDL include: The Edward R. Murrow Collection, A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825, and The Oral Histories Collection.
Tufts' Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Geology Department, Tisch Library, and Academic Technology developed a geotechnical database for use in engineering education and research. By integrating the analysis capabilities of a Geographic Information System (GIS) with Environmental Visualization Software (EVS), students and researchers can explore civil engineering constraints for construction in downtown Boston, caused by the historic filling of land in Boston's peninsula. A personalized Desktop GIS and Internet mapping application enables 2-D and 3-D visualization of Boston's subsurface soil database, acquired through the Central Artery's Big Dig project.
ConStats is a education tool designed at Tufts University that permits introductory statistics students to actively experiment with statistical ideas and reasoning. Unlike data analysis programs, ConStats modules give users hands-on experience with statistical concepts that will deepen understanding of the science of statistics.
CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) carries out research on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25. CIRCLE's website assembles the best and most serious research about youth civic engagement to one place. It also provides tools for civic engagement education, youth programming and civic assessment. CIRCLE is based at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship & Public Service at Tufts University.
AquaPedia (beta version) is a virtual world of trustworthy, pertinent, and readily available water information and wisdom collected and synthesized by users and producers of explicit (water information) and tacit (water wisdom) knowledge. The transformative and collaborative power of AquaPedia will make water a flexible and expandable resource. Developed at Tufts, AquaPedia presents an example of the emerging trend to integrate collaborative technologies and trans-disciplinary scholarship to create actionable knowledge.
OpenGeoportal is a collaboratively developed, open source, joined together web application to discover, preview, and get back geospatial data swiftly, as well as a new union of geospatial professionals, developers, and librarians working jointly to share resources and best practices in geospatial portal application development, metadata, data sharing, data licensing, and data sources. Partners include: Harvard, MIT, MassGIS, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Cornell, Yale, USAID – GIST, University of Georgia/State of Georgia, University of Connecticut, University of Wisconsin, and University of Virginia.
GeoData@Tufts is the Tufts live example of the OpenGeoportal application. Presently Tufts, Harvard, MIT, MassGIS, and UC Berkeley data is accessible through the interface, i.e. about 10,000 geospatial data layers.
