Open Educational Resources

A number of friends of mine seem to have recently rediscovered the public library, and with physical books rapidly becoming obsolete we're seeing the inevitable upsurge in sentimental accounts of their value and the value of libraries full of them. Of course the purpose of libraries is to make human knowledge as widely available as possible, something for which digital media are ideal. But we haven't had the kind of deliberate public focus on this that our ancestors put into library building.

Kevin Carey reports, however, that this is quickly changing thanks to a little-noted Obama administration initiative:

The concept is simple: Community colleges that compete for federal money to serve students online will be obliged to make those materials—videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, and more—available to everyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license. The materials will become, to use the common term, open educational resources, or OER's.

The open-resource movement has been under way since the 1990s, with free content distributed by institutions including Carnegie Mellon and Yale Universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But there has never been an effort to promulgate OER's on a $2-billion scale.

For its part, the Education Department hired someone with an unusual résumé for a federal bureaucrat: Hal Plotkin, a community-college trustee and veteran Silicon Valley journalist who has covered business, education, and technology for outlets like CNBC, Forbes, and Inc. Plotkin is no utopian, having heard more than his share of overheated claims about the wonders of technology. Yet he says the program will create "the greatest expansion of access to high-quality education and job-training opportunities in the history of the world."

As Carey notes, there's a lot more to making this a viable alternative to current community colleges than simply creating the big OER database. But this is a really important first step. And the Creative Commons nature of the project means that all different kinds of people and institutions will have access to the source material and thus the ability to try to tinker with it and sort the rest out.