4.+Current+News+and+Issues




 * Current News and Issues **

When the Masssachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), one of the most prestigious universities in the world, announced that it was going to allow anyone with an internet connection to view for free a large number of classes taught there through a program called [|Open Courseware], it caught many in the academic world by surprise. This was a victory for the Open Content movement and for students and teachers around the world who can now sit at a coffee shop and virtually attend many MIT lectures. Following their lead, school officials at Tufts, [|Yale], [|Rice] , Oxford, and University of California at Irvine to name a few have announced similar programs which will provide students with easier access to free materials. In fact, in a recent article in ecampus news, it was predicted that by 2016 Open Courseware will be available on every college campus. (13)

Some critics were probably asking themselves: why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? However, MIT's OpenCourseware Program turned out to be a stroke of genius. Professors are claiming that since their lectures are viewed publicly by thousands outside the university they are "perfecting their material" and improving the quality of content. In an unexpected bonus, 60% of the professors believe that Open courseware has improved their department's reputation. Browsing through MIT's Courseware one sees tips for studying for the AP exams, samples of the work students will be doing in college and even some science demonstrations on concepts studied in high school performed by MIT professors. All this in an effort to recruit high achieving students to apply to MIT and it seems to be working. Thirty-five percentage said that "Courseware materials influenced their college choice." (13)

﻿In other Open Content-related news, the rising cost of textbooks has inspired the formation of a new partnership between Rice University, Oxford, Open University and iTune U. Through the Open University alone there have been over 20 million downloads of textbooks, lectures and other educational material on iTune U. (14)

Also in recent news, Flat World Knowledge, the open license textbook publisher, claims that over 1300 instructors at over 800 colleges and universities are using their books, passing the $1,000 savings onto their students. (15)

It is clear that Open Content is here to stay. It has become almost a political movement reminding us of the Civil Rights Movement when thousands of disenfranchised African Americans demanded equal rights. With more and more groups allowing open access to all of their materials we are reaching a moment in the history of education and learning when those with a reliable internet connection will have virtually equal access to the hundreds of millions of pages on online material. At least that's the dream. The big question is: when will the 90% of the people on this planet who don't have a computer or mobile computing device share in this information revolution?