Open
education week
One approach to challenging expanding corporate
control of education is open education resources. These are digital education resources anyone
can download for free.
The OpenCourseWare (OCW) Consortium declared March
11 to 15 as "open education week" to help publicize the tremendous
educational resources and courses that are now available for free online.
Many resources are from universities and are used by
higher education students. However, a
survey by OCW found that secondary students made up more than ten percent of
its users. The survey also showed that
the reason most often given for going to the site was "personal
learning."
Open textbooks offer alternatives to hugely
expensive post-secondary texts. They
become "open" when the copyright-holder gives public rights through
an open license. The textbook author
retains copyright to the content, not the publisher.
A leader in Canada is the BC Open Textbook project. It provides information and resources to
assist in developing and making available open textbooks and other open
resources. Its list of sources of open
textbooks gives quick access to finding what is already available.
All the massive access now available online is great,
but who judges the quality of the content or the accuracy of the information?
Some sources of open education resources:
The British Columbia Open Textbook project: http://open.bccampus.ca
ITunes U has more than 500,000 free lectures,
videos, books and other content.
OCW Consortium portal--links to courses that can be used
for free: http://ocwconsortium.org/
The UK Open University portal OpenLearn: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/
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