In revisiting a post I drafted Saturday morning I decided to split out the following passages into a new post to isolate a few details and trivia on the history of the open education movement, mostly to facilitate explicit fulfillment of quests for IPT692R.
Brief Background History of Open Education
While interest and movements toward ideals of “open education” predate the Internet, the modern open education (or, perhaps more specifically, the open educational resources) movement was born of several simultaneously developing initiatives that coincided with the popularization of the Internet, and especially the World WIde Web. The rapid development of informational resources publicly on the Internet led to conflict between copyright holders and consumers. To accommodate demand, commercial software led to shareware, which led to freeware. Most of these energies gathered around software in the mid to late 1990s, but at the same time many online users published and consumed copyright materials outside the law, further demonstrating the demand for what Lawrence Lessig would come to describe as Free Culture movement. and soon an “free culture” movement began to develop.
And while debates over use and meanings and benefits of the terms “free” versus “open” ensued, the idea of “open content” emerged through the thinking and efforts of David Wiley, who founded the Open Content Project which after some interations eventually bore the Open Publication License in 1999, the clear precursor of Creative Commons licenses in 2002, the same year UNESCO conducted it’s Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education.
Though the birth of open education is popularly ascribed to the UNESCO Forum as early as 1999 MIT was discussing the idea of releasing content on the internet, and in 2001 the Mellon and Hewlett foundations announced $11 million in grant funding for MIT’s OpenCourseWare project. and followed with the release of 50 open courses. It is tempting to generalize all the institutions that have followed MIT’s trailblazing example, and even joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium, as proponents of open education, but that may not always be the case, and we must not make the mistake of equating the two. “Open education” as a movement can not be made synonymous with other “open content” or even “open educational” efforts”, for it is possible that proponents of the OCW project or publishers of OER in fact conflict with the broad stated goals of the Cape Town Declaration or the UNESCO statement. I’ll look at this later when I seek to exam case studies of organizational motivations for engaging in open education or related efforts.
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