The open movement

I've been doing considerable reading on the opencourseware movement for a special project. Opencourseware is, of course, the movement to freely available course content from higher ed institutions. The public can log in to these courses and partake in as little or as much of the course as desired. No credit is given, there is no interaction with the instructor or other students, and the seeker of knowledge is not associated with the institution in any way. The more I immersed into the open movement, the greater I realized was the extent of freely available course content. And with the availability of course content comes the possibility of open education, or the ability of students to create their own degree plan based on the needs of their future employer. This unbundling of the current educational model presents a mind-boggling assortment of ideas, options, and possibilities, way too large in scope for a single blog post. However, the intent of unbundling is to make higher education 1) accessible to the masses rather than a privileged few, 2) remove the cookie-cutter approach to education and replace with a model more in-tune to what future employees actually need to be competitive in the job market, and 3) make education something that is desired rather than required by students.

Arizona State University Skysong hosted the Education Innovation Summit in April 2010, an invitation-only event for business, education, government, and others. The purpose was to begin discussion on how to change the current model of education and what would be necessary to do so. A number of thought-provoking sessions are now available. Of particular note are the following sessions:

• Education is Free, Credentials are Expensive
• Open Campus
• Disruptive Technologies and How They'll be Deployed

A recurring theme throughout the summit, and in other media that discuss open educational resources, are the need to unbundle the higher educational package now provided to students. The one-size-fits-all is the model that has evolved over tens and hundreds of years, but the accessibility and immediacy of content makes this a less-than-ideal method for educating a workforce that is more and more dependent on technology and accessibility to knowledge.

Recurring themes for future examination include open source course management systems (think Moodle or Google's recently announced CloudCourse), opencourseware, open university models (University of the People or P2PU), and open access publishing (big thanks to Terry Anderson and AU Press for their continued support for this long-overdue need.