Opening Education

Open Education - Let's be More Free!

As discussed on several of the previous pages, the movements towards open education resources, and courseware is wide and varied. One of the leaders in spearheading open education is certainly MIT who opened their first site offering all the resources for 32 courses in 2002. Their OpenCourseWare lives up to the school's mission to advance knowledge and educate students to serve the nation and world. By 2009, they had over 1900 courses available online.

In 2005 MIT OpenCourseWare joined forces with like minded groups to form the OpenCourseware Consortium. Movements also include the Open Access movement led by librarians who fight for free use of learning and research resources, and people like Wayne Macintosh founder of WikiEducator who fights to provide training for teachers in the use and development of open materials and working towards free education curricula. Lawrence Lessig too, fights for the openness necessary to allow creative works built on past culture. Schoolforge.net, Students for a Free Culture, Open Source Education Foundation, Open Educational Resources, Creative Commons and the Free Culture Movement also have done much to promote access to open and free educational resources.

With schools facing ever shrinking budgets, it would be hard to imagine that teachers and administrators would not take advantage of the wealth of resources that are open and mostly free. With costs of textbooks increasing and the availability of information on the web, students are demanding teachers consider alternatives to expensive time-limited textbooks.

From the Cost of Free's perspective, the future is open.



There is a wealth of available materials!..now a little humour..

Next up: Open Textbooks