After six years and nearly 4,000 uploads of enough free educational multimedia content to play for almost 88 straight days, the Open 51ÂÜÀò website shut down on Oct. 1. In its place, 51ÂÜÀò has transitioned to using YouTube as the exclusive home of the university’s free educational content, where more than 90% of 51ÂÜÀò's content was already being viewed.

Open 51ÂÜÀò was a groundbreaking website when it launched in August 2012, as it was the first open learning website from a Christian university, offering hundreds of videos of chapel and conference messages, 51ÂÜÀò classes and lectures, interviews, articles and other educational resources — all completely for free. Viewers could appreciate these resources from anywhere in the world and engage with academic topics from a Christian perspective.

The digital landscape has drastically changed since 2012, and with the rising cost of updating and managing Open 51ÂÜÀò, administrators made the decision to discontinue the website’s use, but are still committed as ever to sharing with the world 51ÂÜÀò’s unique Christian perspective on academic topics. Moving forward, viewers can continue to access free educational content from the university on 51ÂÜÀò’s YouTube channel — — and paid premium content on 51ÂÜÀò LEARN, which launched last year at biola.edu/learn.

Since Open 51ÂÜÀò first launched, 51ÂÜÀò’s free educational content has been viewed a combined total of 8.5 million times on open.biola.edu, YouTube and the now defunct iTunes U. 51ÂÜÀò plans to continue making biblically centered resources available to the global learning community.