Fulfilling the Promise of Open Content

A passionate argument for more, and more planned, open content:

Recently, experts in education, open content– along with alternative-copyright advocates and Internet innovators – gathered in Cape Town to explore how to spark a global revolution in teaching and learning in which educators and students could be much more actively engaged as creators, users, and adapters of content. In their Cape Town declaration, they argued that this transformation can only occur if educators, authors, publishers, and higher education institutions make more materials available and accessible for public use. To speed acceptance of open content, the declaration calls on administrators to incorporate open education into policy decisions, making sharing of educational resources a new priority. The document emphasizes that open education is fundamentally about strengthening all scholarship and teaching through collaboration—and developing the technologies to make that happen. Open education should be a “win” for all faculty members and constitutes “a wise investment in teaching and learning for the 21st century.”

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[F]or the OER movement to have greater impact on higher education, colleges and universities need to create incentives to reward faculty for sharing their content. This might include developing new types of sabbaticals focused on creating the first generation of open educational resources. Foundations could even fund “remixing communities” focused on expanding and refining open educational resources.

In addition to faculty, whose scholarship can advance immeasurably faster with broad adoption of OER, students stand to benefit enormously. Open education holds the promise of opening the door of higher education to millions. For example, open content can reduce the need to purchase expensive textbooks, which can constitute up to three-fourths of community-college students’ spending. But even these benefits are not the final yield of the OER movement, which holds the promise of nothing less than finally ensuring that access to the highest-quality education is a right of all people, everywhere.