Building the Global Open Education Infrastructure
Larry Cooperman
OpenCourseWare, University of California, Irvine, USA
We are entering an era in which educational content is free. The promise of open education is to permit anyone to study whatever they want regardless of barriers of location and income. This paper looks at the global landscape of four intersecting concepts: open education, distance education, public education, and free education. What does open education have to do to keep its promise of universally accessible higher education?
UNESCO’s 2009 report on higher education described “massification” and its attendant issues of academic quality, as well as the growing gap between physical infrastructure and enrollment trends. Within this framework, open education is an extension of accessibility trends that are already visible through the spread of mass, distance education throughout both the developed and emerging worlds.
Open education is not up to its mission yet. Reuse of open educational resources is laborious. A search for appropriate courses and content yields heaps of unwanted results. Repositories and curated collections hold too many assets for ease-of-discoverability and too few for full-blown course development. Granularity is often at the level of assets rather than curricula.
The investment in physical infrastructure to support student enrollment growth in the coming years is beyond the capabilities of the public sector to fund. But we have to take the same challenge and apply it to distance and open education. What educational infrastructure do we need to develop an educated global citizenry capable of addressing growing challenges? Apply that question to the individual: what steps must be taken so that a young person can find others with whom to study, curricular paths leading toward productive citizenship, and expert advice when he or she needs it? This paper starts from the promise of open education to describe the new supporting educational infrastructure — from policies to tools — that can make it a reality.
Keywords: open education, OpenCourseware, OER, Chile, Korea, Colombia