The Hewlett Foundation, ccLearn (Creative Commons' educational division) and Google are working together to build an open education web-scale search, part of a larger effort to offer web users simple, overarching mechanisms for discovering open educational resources (OERs).

This tool aims to direct search engine traffic to the incredible diversity of OER repositories and communities. While such a tool would not replace the more specialized and sophisticated search sites and portals that the community already uses, it would expose a much wider public to the community's materials.

UNESCO, partner of the Hewlett Foundation in the promotion of the open educational content movement, sees in this initiative an opportunity to encourage OER adoption and specify legal and technical conditions for making educational resources openly available.

ccLearn is coordinating the project by collecting URLs for all existing OER sites and online materials. This collection of URLs will be available to anyone who wants it - either to build a new service, repository or portal, or to improve the reach of an existing site. In classic OER manner, the partners wish to pool the shared knowledge and resources, and provide the resulting collection of URLs as a free "kernel" that anyone can use.

The goal of this project is to increase the visibility and traffic to all specialized OER repositories. Web-scale search will increase awareness and utilization of OER by directing interested users to existing sites more successfully.

This project is therefore an important step for achieving large-scale access to and use of open educational resources.