By KEVIN CAREY [Chronicle of Higher Education] – 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…
These disparate elements are beginning to form an entire ecosystem for teaching and crediting human knowledge and skill, one that exists entirely outside the traditional colleges and universities that use their present monopoly on the credentialing franchise to extract increasingly large sums of money from students.
Open education has, to date, done little to puncture that closed system. Proposals for the first $500-million of the $2-billion arrived at the Labor Department only a few weeks ago, so the exact nature of the programs remains to be seen.
But this unexpected infusion of federal open educational resources—an on-the-fly modification of a last-minute program appended to a much larger student-loan reform that was itself appended to a much larger health-care bill—could have a catalytic effect on a movement that increasingly looks like the future of higher-education reform.
Continued at The Chronicle of Higher Education | More Chronicle & Notices.
