Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1378727.1388950
Viewpoint
Global Warming Toward
Open Educational Resources
Seeking to realize the potential for significantly improving
and advancing the world’s standard of education.
THERE IS A looming discontent
in the education world. Karen
has dropped out of community college because her textbook costs exceeded her tuition bill. Eric, a third grader, must share
his math textbook with his classmate because there aren’t enough textbooks for
all of the students. Juan’s parents can’t
help him with his homework because
they don’t read English. Kelly, a science
teacher, wonders whether Pluto will be
reinstated as a planet by the time it is
removed from her school’s science textbooks. Rashid, a master teacher, is examining some of the 109,263 errors recently
found in textbooks under review by the
Texas State Board of Education. Patrick,
a premedical student, is struggling to understand Newton’s laws of motion from
the text, formulas, and pictures in his
textbook. Carla, an elementary school
teacher, must purchase music materials
out-of-pocket for her fourth-grade class
due to a reduced school budget. And
John, a university professor, is astonished to learn that the book he published
three years ago is already out of print.
The buzz surrounding the high cost,
limited access, static nature, and often
low quality of the world’s textbooks has
reached a crescendo lately, with many
claiming a serious threat to the future of
the next generation, the training of work
forces worldwide, and the democratic
process in society. The current predicament lowers the quality of education in
the developed world; even worse, it puts
education out of reach for many in the
developing world.
Imagine another world that has forestalled this crisis. A world where textbooks and other learning materials are
free for all on the Web, available in low-cost printed versions, adapted to many
backgrounds and learning styles, interactive and immersive, translated into
myriad languages, continually up to date
and corrected, and never out of print.
Imagine virtual labs that can be used
any hour of the day (or night). While this
world was just a dream a decade ago,
the Open Educational Resources (OER)
movement that aims to create it has begun to coalesce and gather momentum.
enter open educational Resources
The OER movement is based on a set
of intuitions shared by a wide range of
academics: knowledge should be free
and open to use and reuse; collaboration should be easier, not more difficult; people should receive credit and
kudos for contributing to education and
research; and concepts and ideas are
linked in unusual and surprising ways,
not necessarily the simple linear forms
that today’s textbooks present. OERs
promise to fundamentally change the
way authors, instructors, and students
interact worldwide. 1, 3, 4
The OER movement takes the inspiration of the open source software
movement, mixes in the powerful communication and visualization abilities
of the Internet and the Web, and applies
the result to teaching and learning materials like course notes, curricula, labs,
and textbooks. OERs include text, images, audio, video, interactive simulations,
problems and answers, and games that
are free to use and reuse in new ways by
