The OpenCourseWare Consortium has announced the 2013 winners of Site  Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence (ACE).
Notre Dame OpenCourseWare was named as the recipient of the Landmark Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence.  The University of Notre Dame was one of the founding members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and launched their OCW site in 2006.  The site currently has more than 50 courses in 24 subject areas, and in 2012 the site received visits from 300,000 individuals in 211 countries and territories around the world.
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya OCW will receive the Outstanding New Site Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence.  Sharing material from more than 200 UPC courses, the UPC OCW platform is also integrated with different information systems of the university: Prisma, which supports certain management processes, including curriculum, students and academic records, registration and assessment; Gauss provides information about users, site work; and finally the library catalog provides information on the books of the recommended bibliography.
Peer 2 Peer University has been named as the recipient of the Technical Innovation Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence for the creation of an e-mail tool, called the MOOC Maker, for offering Massive Open Online Courses using OpenCourseWare and other Open Educational Resources. Originally developed and used for a courses called The Mechanical MOOC – A Gentle Introduction to Python, which enrolled 8,000 learners in the fall of 2012 and early 2013, the MOOC Maker has subsequently been used to structure a course through the MIT Media Lab called Learning Creative Learning, which enrolled 24,000 learners.
The Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence provide annual recognition to outstanding individuals, courseware and OpenCourseWare sites in the OCW Consortium community.  The awards are presented each year at the global OpenCourseWare Consortium’s annual conference, to be held this year May 8-10 in Bali, Indonesia.  Individual award recipients are selected by the Consortium’s Board of Directors; site and course awards are selected by an awards committee populated from the Consortium membership.
“These three sites are outstanding examples of the creativity, dedication and generosity that are hallmarks of the OCWC community,” said OCW Consortium Executive Director Mary Lou Forward.  ”We are thrilled to recognize their efforts and help draw attention to their contributions to the global body of open educational resources.”
Read the full press release.