About
Cambridge University Press was founded by a royal charter granted to the University of Cambridge by King Henry VIII in 1534. It is the oldest printer and publisher in the world, having been operating continuously since 1584, and is one of the largest academic publishers globally. Its purpose is to further the University's objective of advancing learning, knowledge and research. Global Grid for Learning is a Cambridge University Press initiative to create a digital content supply network for education worldwide. The goal of the initiative is to connect one billion resources to education by 2018.
At the heart of our strategy is the Global Grid for Learning platform and library that makes it easy for educators to search and download over a million education resources in a variety of formats from thousands of content sources worldwide through common software applications. The platform has two discretely managed services, one for professionally developed commercial content for which there is a fee, www.globalgridforlearning.com, and one for free and open content resources which are available to registered users for free, www.globalgridforlearning.org.
The Global Grid for Learning enables educators to engage students in active learning experiences:
- Single source for thousands of content sources
- Easy access to over a million classroom-safe learning resources covering all aspects of the curriculum from trusted content providers.
- Copyright-cleared images, video clips, audio files, text documents and learning objects ready for you to incorporate into your lessons.
- Easy to use search facility – helps you find what you need for your students instantly.
- Regular updates and new content continually added.
Cambridge University Press recognizes that the existing publishing industry can only provide one part of the content solution for global education and that free and open content initiatives provided by both commercial and non-commercial organisations worldwide have a significant role to play. globalgridforlearning.org is a separate not-for-profit initiative to support:
- educators in the creation, sharing and sourcing of open education resources
- indigenous publishers in the creation of local professional content.
www.globalgridforlearning.org will support this objective by working with governments, educational institutions and other projects through its 4C initiative. www.globalgridforlearning.org is being lead by Dublin City University’s Learning, Innovation and Knowledge Research Centre (LiNK) and Arizona State University’s Applied Learning Technologies Institute (alt^I). The Project Directors for www.globalgridforlearning.org are Dr. Theo Lynn (LiNK, DCU) and Dr. Sam DiGangi (alt^I, ASU)
