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"with OER comes a few key professional development challenges. The vast quantity of resources--tested and untested alike--available online is one key hurdle. Helping instructors develop a mindset around "constant revision" and encouraging ongoing open course development are two other tricky areas that can make or break an institution's OER initiative."

Open source textbook publisher projects $1M in savings OpenStax has been well received on college campuses as textbook prices remain stubbornly high College students in some of the most heavily attended courses in the country will eclipse $1 million in textbook savings after a Rice University-based publisher had 13,000 open-source books downloaded since June.

Note the emphasis on open: "I mean open source technology, available for anyone to use for free; open educational resources; content that people produce and put on the Internet for everyone to use. And the new Internet culture of social networking, where people share, teach and learn from each other for free. " And accreditation.

"Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses-and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them."

"For four years, students in John Sterman's [2] business management courses have gone toe to toe in simulated business arenas, with the latest being a concocted world of video game companies looking for an edge in marketing and selling their game consoles and software. The university announced Nov. 30 that the simulation, known as "Platform Wars," [3] would be freely available on the MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) website, following the lead of MIT's OpenCoursWare program [4], a seminal experiment in higher education's sharing of open source material."

"The colleges in 15 states and one Canadian province that make up the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) will now be able to tap into the collection of open textbook resources compiled by the international group of institutions that make up the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW Consortium) and vice versa in a new partnership. "

Mr. Stark's class is one of about 300 around the world to use online course material-both the content and the software that delivers it-developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative. If the Obama administration pulls off a $500-million-dollar online-education plan, proposed in July as one piece of a sweeping community-college aid package, this type of course could become part of a free library available to colleges nationwide.

P2PU

"Colleges and universities have no reason to view OER as a threat. On the contrary, OER can help institutions provide higher education to rapidly increasing numbers of students and lifelong learners. Traditional colleges and universities, with their experience and reputation, are in a good position to further develop online teaching, testing, learning communities, and certification."

Anka Mulder is President of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and Secretary General of Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page. Open Educational Resources (OER) have become an unstoppable development since MIT started publishing educational resources online as OpenCourseWare (OCW) in 2001.