Open Education Policy

(Video from Blinktower, Winner of the 2012 Why Open Education Matters Video Contest)

What I have learned from Dr. Cable Green’s Presentation:

As Dr. Cable proposed, the basic principles of Education Policy are:

1. Efficient use of national/state tax dollars
2. Saving students money
3. Increasing access to education

The Dream of Open Education is that everyone in the world can obtain all the education that they desire. FREE in Open Education does not mean as free cost, but as the freedom to use the resources and modify them as needed. Policy Makers need to understand the tools and needs of 21^st century education. With the school budget cut, library resources/journal subscriptions are becoming more limited as well. That’s another reason for promoting Open Education. According to the data, the top 100 courses in most universities are same courses, so why not sure share our resources to make it better? Even translate into other languages?

Why focus on Open Policy – this is where the money is. Money is spent to buy textbooks and create courseware. If we switch to open license and public can have access to it and it can reduce costs. Use public fund to build/maintain open resources. As Tax payers, we have right to access what we paid for – and all the education resources are built with government (public) funding.

Dr. Cable’s idea is consistent with the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which stated that “Governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources”. – Cape Town Open Education Declaration (http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration)

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration also indicated that “Open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologist that facilitates collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues.” In the other words, to make the course better (for students).

 I also want to point out that from the Survey Results of Faculty and Online Education conducted by InsideHigherEd.com, it showed that certain percentages of faculty members believed that their institution is pushing too much instruction online and they have more fear than excitement on the growth of online education. The reason for mentioning this survey data is because most open education course are online and when we are thinking about promoting Open Education and OER, we also need to consider how to reduce the negative thoughts/reactions of online education among faculty members.