Open Education

Without a doubt, this is an extremely difficult nut to crack.  Knowledge and courses are the life blood of educational institutions and will be aggressively protected.  And

that's even before one looks into whether the course is simply free, or whether it lives up to the open source principles of sharing and modification of course material.

Due to the limitations of available courseware based on open source principles, we will be looking at a number of free courses as well, since any education is good education, in the end, if it serves the student and potentially society.

To understand the challenges, one needs simply to look at the reality that education institutions make their money on students.  Their money comes straight from the students and can also come from non-government organizations, government, and even corporate money and private donations.

Looking at current education models, it is understandable that these institutions have high overhead cost from buildings, course ware, instructors / professors, lab equipment, administration, security, etc.  These are very real and valid costs.

In order to get good funding and revenue from students, these institutions strive to rate high among their peers in order and ultimately train the best students that will be in high demand.

So when someone begins looking for open education, it is relatively easy to find "free" (as in no cost) courses that one can take on line.  And as mentioned earlier, sometimes education for the sake of education is good enough.

What one often finds though, is that these free courses do not provide the successful student with a certificate, diploma, or degree.  Or worse, the certificate, diploma or degree is not recognized by the business world.  And often in further cases, the courses are simply not something that is of value to get a job.  Such as taking a course on water desalinization.

Although this will be a challenge to the open source movement in the years ahead, it is something that will very likely be overcome as more and more people are embracing open source initiatives and those that fear to loose the most will find ways to stay in business on an open source framework.

Open education should eventually evolve to a point where a student can take a relevant, valid, and recognized course or program, the courses themselves will be free in many cases and the course work can be shared and modified in accordance to the open source framework.

And so it seems, the Open CourseWare (OCW) consortium is pursuing that end.

Here is the wikipedia description of OpenCourseWare.

edX is suggested to follow the OCW framework.

Coursera is not believed to be OCW, although it appears to be a well received and recognized initiative.  It is just our opinion that this list would be remiss if we did not include mention of this online resource.

There is the Open Learning Initiative which caters to both those who want to learn AND those who want to teach.

The wikipedia article on the Sloop project suggests the project is based on the same principles as the free software movement.

And the wikipedia article on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) has additional information and mentions a number of resources including edX and Coursera.