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When the visits and comments from professionals around the world started coming in, students realized that the papers they were writing weren’t just throw-away pieces for class – they were read and discussed by their future peers out in the world.

I began posting my syllabus on a publicly available wiki and doing my best to select only readings that were also publicly available and that I could link to from the syllabus.

As I began blogging about my online teaching materials, people from around the world began to see and make use of them in their own courses. Others outside universities started using them to guide their personal study.

Introduction to Open Education.

Do we professors, who live rather privileged lives relative to the vast majority of the planet’s population, have a moral obligation to make our teaching efforts as broadly impactful as possible, reaching out to bless the lives of as many people as we can? Especially when participatory technologies make it so inexpensive (almost free) for us to do so? I believe the answer is yes. —David Wiley

A second general difference separating learning objects from their open educational counterparts is indicated by the absence of any explicit reference to the openness or the open and noncommercial character of the resource.

What is significant in each definition is precisely what is included and excluded: Each definition highlights (either directly or indirectly) modularity as a technological and design attribute for the object and its content, emphasizing the “self-contained,” “building block” or “object-oriented” nature of the technology.

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)

this project recently met its original ambitious goal of placing all of MIT’s course content online by 2007

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

the funding for the operations of many of the projects is either provided by a parent institution

by a governmental organization

or by a combination of these types of sources.

he many projects that have fallen inactive or been discontinued

the nature and the enormity of the sustainability challenge online educational resource collections face.  

The clear sustainability lesson from both this listing of inactive projects and the earlier listing of active efforts is the importance of ongoing, operational institutional or consortial funding for educational resource collections and the difficulty of realizing alternative funding models. Online educational resource initiatives of this kind, one can conclude, need to be seen as processes or services rather than as products that persist of their own accord.

Only projects that are large-scale, well-funded, and able to benefit from a first-mover advantage (i.e., being one of the first of their kind) seem to have any chance of developing collections whose scope extends to all educational subjects

The issue of sustainability of OER projects, unsurprisingly, was one of the top concerns

awareness raising and promotion; communities and networking of creators and users; and capacity development, specifically as it relates to the development and pedagogical application of OERs.

The necessary preconditions for viability – awareness, capacity, community, cultural change – are identical with what would be the results of success.

the majority of the use of this material not only takes place outside of the USA, it also occurs outside in the context of reuse and adaptation by teachers or instructional designers.

“OCW use is centered on subjects for which MIT is recognized leader

32% of faculty say that putting materials online has improved their teaching

David Wiley presents a conclusion that may be of the utmost significance for OER: “The time will come when an OpenCourseWare or similar collection of open access educational materials will be as fully expected from every higher education institution as an informational website is now” (2006, p. 6).

They need not risk financial and cultural capital on creating yet another collection or repository, but instead can invest it in the quality and accessibility of their course offerings.

It only asks of its members a contribution of 12 courses to its growing collection of over 10,000 courses

The point, as Wiley explains, is that “this strategy of openness” holds out the promise of “catalyzing further innovations” (2006).