By Sir John Daniel and David Killion. By being adaptable and accessible, OERs have the potential to solve the global education crisis and contribute to sustainable economic growth - if governments are prepared to act.
As economic leaders gathered in Los Cabos in June to debate fiscal strategies for restoring global growth, educational leaders were meeting at Unesco headquarters in Paris to discuss a different kind of solution. Discussed at length at the inaugural Unesco World Open Educational Resources Congress, this approach sees Open Educational Resources (OER) as the key not only to solving the global education crisis but to unlocking sustainable global growth in the 21st century- that is, if governments are ready to seize on their potential.
OERs are learning materials that can be accessed, used, and transformed by anyone, anywhere. Though the concept is simple, the economic potential is tremendous and the advantages are two-fold: First, OERs can lower education costs substantially. In the American northwest, for example, Washington State decision to digitise 81 of its highest enrolled community college courses and make them freely available as OERs, through an open course library. The move will save students more than $40 million a year once the entire system completes the transformation, with the initial costs of $1.8 million already offset in its very first year of limited implementation. OERs can also help universities reduce their marketing costs. Open resources have been a boon for recruitment: 35% of MIT applicants tell their admissions office that they chose MIT after they looked at its OpenCourseWare. Open resources can also help bolster a school's global reputation: 91% of visitors to Open University's page on iTunes U are from outside the UK.
But what crystallised at the Unesco Congress are the larger economic implications of the OER movement and its potential to dramatically expand the global knowledge economy. As policymakers struggle to apply traditional fiscal and monetary tools to mend world markets restrained by weak purchasing power, accelerated learning based on OERs could do more to stimulate global economic demand and growth than all the world's tax holidays combined - then multiplied ten-fold.
How? By making education more accessible and adaptable to the changing needs of the global economy. The best new OER programs, including a new $2 billion initiative by President Obama, are working closely with industry to create credentials earned from OER that are linked to specific occupations or job openings. So, for example, a company that needs cybersecurity experts will work with an educational institution to make sure the OER training and or education is aligned with exactly what that business needs. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that learners can be trained more quickly using OER. A recent study conducted by scholars associated with Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative demonstrated that students who use OERs can obtain the same or better learning outcomes in half the time compared with students using traditional methods.
This means that OERs can be used to create a better trained, more flexible global workforce for the 21st century. Imagine what our global economy will look like when the estimated 90% or more of earth's inhabitants currently locked out of high-quality post-secondary education and job training opportunities finally get a fair shot. And what happens when we can finally start matching curricula to the changing employer needs? The OER movement has been steadily gaining momentum since its inception, as more and more individuals and institutions discover its extraordinary potential. Over 400,000 teachers have benefited from the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa program, whilst the Open University's OpenLearn website has had more than 21 million visits since its launch in 2006. One by one, the world's most prestigious universities are launching new OER initiatives. In May, Harvard University announced it would join forces with the MIT to create edX, a platform that provides free access to rigorous online courses to students anywhere in the world. Stanford University is planning a similar venture.
Initiatives like these are remarkable, but higher education activities can only go so far. Governments are by far the biggest suppliers of education worldwide. They have the most to contribute to the OER movement and the most to gain in terms of cost savings and economic growth.
The first Unesco World OER Congress concluded with a declaration that urged governments to play a more active role in supporting this movement, which has, to date, been largely funded by a few supportive foundations. This call to action is about more than education. It is about widening the circle of those able to contribute to renewed economic growth. Governments around the world would do well to heed that call.
Sir John Daniel, knighted for his contribution to education, served as president and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning from 2004 to 2012 and as Unesco's assistant director-general for education from 2001 to 2004.
David Killion is the US ambassador to Unesco. He led the US delegation to the World OER Congress.

The movement for free access to research results is gaining momentum. What first looked like the desperate outcries of single researchers has fast turned into a mass movement. In the UK, a blog entry of Tim Gowers, a Cambridge mathematician, has led within a few months to 9 000 researchers pledging to neither submit papers, nor to act as peer reviewers for publishers who charge for access. A similar boycott movement is underway in the US, in reaction to what most academics regard as exorbitantly high pricing policies of publishers. Complaints are not only about pricing, but also about the often many years in which the publisher keep the exclusive copyright. Criticism is in particular directed at Elsevier, the world’s number one in scientific journals.

In the US, a bipartisan bill for a Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced in both the Senate and Congress. If successful, the proposal would lead to the requirement of free access on the internet to all publications emanating from publicly funded research in the US. Research Councils UK is planning similar rules for the results of research for which it provided grants. Unhappy researchers have now received another significant boost from the European Union, the World Bank and the Wellcome Trust. Nellie Kroes, a Vice-President of the European Commission, announced plans to make open access obligatory for any publication resulting from grants under the Horizon 2020 Programme, the next generation of EU Research Framework Programmes. Under the current FP7, the EU Commission had already run a (more limited) Open Access Pilot. A day before Kroes’ announcement, made on 11 April, the World Bank revealed its own plans for a future open access policy. As the first step, all of the Bank’s own research will be made available free of charge online. The already existing Open Knowledge Repository will gradually be expanded. On the same day, the Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity in the UK, announced plans to create its own open access journal.
The case for open online access after a reasonable (short) embargo period seems compelling. Most research is publicly funded and the public, therefore, deserves unpaid access, as Kroes pointed out. The bulk of the work, inclusive of producing, peer reviewing and even formatting research papers, is done by the researchers themselves, who increasingly feel that publishers are ‘taking them for a ride‘. And the present practice of fee-based research creates a ‘pay-wall’ which hinders the speed of scientific progress, and thus lowers our chances of solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, for example in energy, food and climate, as World Bank President Robert Zollick emphasised. The publishers argue that they have high costs to assure the quality of scientific papers. But increasingly, it looks like the other camp is gaining the upper hand and that they will be successful in unchaining new knowledge from the stranglehold of the publishers. European Commission - press release. Homepage of US Congressman Mike Doyle. World Bank. Wellcome Trust.

By Jon Marcus. Just as the Internet has made news free and music cheap, it may be about to vastly lower the cost of one of the most expensive commodities in America: college.
Several new companies and organizations with impressive pedigrees are harnessing the Internet to provide college courses for free, or for next to nothing. And while many traditional universities are slowing this trend by refusing to give academic credit toward degrees to students who complete such programs, several no- and low-cost startups are doing an end-run around this monopoly by inventing new kinds of credentials that employers may consider just as good.
“If I were the universities, I might be a little nervous,” said Alana Harrington, director of Saylor.org,a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit established by entrepreneur Michael Saylor that offers 200 free online college courses in 12 majors.
Among other similar initiatives are Peer-to-Peer University, or P2PU,which also offers free online courses and is supported by the web-browser company Mozilla and the Hewlett Foundation, and University of the People,which charges $10 to $50 for any of more than 40 online courses, and whose backers include the Clinton Global Initiative. Both are also nonprofits.
The content they use comes from top universities, including MIT, Tufts, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan. Those are among some 250 institutions worldwide that have put a collective 15,000 courses online in what has become known as the open-courseware movement.
The universities’ intention is to widen access to course content, including to prospective students. At MIT, for instance, a pioneer of open courseware, half of incoming freshmen report that they’ve looked at MIT online courses and a third say it influenced their decision to go there.
But the material, which includes videos of lectures by top academics, can also be scooped up by others and organized into catalogs of free content. And while the number of students using these services so far is low— at a time when 6.1 million people are taking (and paying for) online courses from nonprofit and for-profit universities, P2PU says it has had 25,000 people open user accounts and University of the People has registered 1,100 students in two years (while Saylor.org has no way of tracking its enrollment)—the momentum is picking up as colleges continue to increase costs and students take on more and more debt to pay for tuition.
A Baltimore-based for-profit company called StraighterLinealso offers online courses for $99 a month plus a $39 registration fee per class, which is less than the cost of tuition at most U.S. community colleges.
“Maybe these upstarts don’t have all the bells and whistles of the beautiful campuses. But people are deciding it’s not worth paying for that,” said Michael Horn, executive director for education at the Innosight Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
Still, conventional colleges and universities are largely refusing to accept transfer credits from these programs, making them less appealing to students. Universities’ currency is, after all, academic credit toward degrees, which employers depend on to determine the qualifications of job applicants. Although they do take transfer credits on a case-by-case basis, the universities say they can’t always judge the quality of courses offered by others, and that reading online content alone, or even watching lectures, is not the same as attending in-person classes.
“Libraries are free, too,” says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.“You can roam around, read books and study. But hardly anyone would say that spending time in the library is a good preparation to work in any economy, much less this one.”
So rather than transfer credit they’ve earned elsewhere, students who want a degree from a conventional university find that they often have to take—and pay for—the same classes again there.
“The last thing universities have to protect themselves is this withholding of academic credit,” said Philipp Schmidt, cofounder and executive director of P2PU, who said the real reason for the schools’ refusal to accept transfer credits is to prevent competition. “It’s not about a deep concern for the interests of the students. It’s about a deep concern for the interests of the institutions.”
Besides, said Debbie Arthur, who has enrolled in StraighterLine courses toward what she hopes will someday be a degree in education: Many classes at universities are no more personal than the ones she takes online.
“The Pollyanna version of college is that you’re learning and discussing things with your professors,” said Arthur, a custom-jewelry maker who lives in Kingsport, Tenn. “The reality is that you have 450 kids in an auditorium listening to a teaching assistant. They’ve killed the golden goose themselves by being greedy, and I think people have started looking really closely at alternatives.”
Several universities agreed to be formal partners with StraighterLine, but then pulled out. One, Fort Hays State University in Kansas,conceded that it bumped the low-price company because it stood to make more money from its own online program. Documents obtained through a public-records request from another, the University of Akron, show that its formal agreement with StraighterLine was canceled in part because of complaints from the faculty senate that it hadn’t been consulted about the deal.
Horn, coauthor of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns,compares this to the way the U.S. auto industry reacted when it began to be threatened by cheaper foreign competition, particularly from Japan.
“As it became clear the Japanese automakers were more and more threatening, the American automakers spent a lot of time trying to keep the Japanese out by erecting tariffs and so forth,” instead of recognizing that consumers wanted smaller, cheaper cars, he said. “That’s the same kind of thinking we’re seeing here.”
In fact, the free-content providers are already trying to break the universities’ monopoly by coming up with altogether new kinds of credentials in place of credits or degrees. Saylor.org, for instance, will next month introduce an “electronic portfolio,” even more detailed than a college transcript, that its students can use to show employers what they’ve learned.
Also this month, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is wrapping up a $2 million competitionto design digital “badges” that can be used instead of university degrees to prove a candidate’s experience and knowledge to employers. P2PU and Saylor are already experimenting with such badges to show when students have completed courses.
Last month, MIT announced a project called MITxthat, starting this spring, will offer certificates of completion to anyone who successfully finishes courses the university makes available for free online, with a small fee for the certificates themselves.
“There’s a fundamental tension between the fact that people want standardization—which is what credentials and accreditation are—where a lot of these new, interesting educational organizations are coming in and saying, ‘Well, we don’t have to standardize,’ ” said Jessy Kate Schingler, a software developer who lives in Washington, D.C., and who has taken courses from P2PU alongside her doctoral studies in computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Meanwhile, some businesses that offer tuition reimbursement to employees are becoming interested in the free- and low-cost education providers, which could put more pressure on traditional universities to accept credits from outside sources or else face the loss of potential transfer students, observers say.
“If employers start to move into this new world, that’s when it’s really going to take off,” said Horn.
CompuCom,a Dallas IT company with 5,000 employees, already has. It’s begun to work with StraighterLine, whose CEO, Burck Smith, said “colleges that want these students later will have to accept StraighterLine credits” as a result.
What CompuCom is doing, said Ed Rankin, who runs the tuition-reimbursement program there, “is analogous to what’s happening in healthcare, where you’ve got insurance companies negotiating on behalf of their insured for lower costs from their healthcare providers.” That’s because StraighterLine’s $99-a-month price tag not only saves CompuCom money; it saves money for the employees, who have to pay a portion of the cost.
Rankin said “there’s no question” other companies are likely to follow suit.
Universities are watching closely. As one direct response, the American Council on Educationplans to set up a blue-ribbon commission to look into alternatives to conventional teaching using new technology, said ACE President Molly Corbett Broad.
“This is a period of significant transformation,” Broad said. She said she expects that higher education is approaching a point at which people will be able “to snap modules together or link them in ways that produce what are sometimes called stackable credentials,” including credits from, for example, community colleges, universities, life experience, online content and other sources.
“There certainly is, I think, going to be competition, and by and large I think competition is a good thing,” Broad said.
A handful of universities have already embraced the low- and no-cost education movement. Albany State University in Georgiaencourages incoming students to take StraighterLine courses before they even arrive, accumulating credit toward their degrees and improving graduation rates.
“The resistance will be there for at least a little while longer,” said the university’s president, Everette Freeman, who faced opposition to the idea from his own faculty. “But it will change. It’s on the wrong side of history.”
Steve Carson, external relations director for MIT’s OpenCourseWare program,who is also on the advisory board of P2PU, said, “There’s no doubt this is a period of uncertainty for universities.” But he said that open-education systems will ultimately help the market grow.
“If there is a way to lower the price of higher education, you can’t stand there for long and say, ‘I’ll resist this and prevent it from happening,’ ” said Shai Reshef, founder and president of University of the People and an entrepreneur who once ran a for-profit higher-education company. “Maybe it will take a long time, and maybe it will be a harder road than it needs to be. But it will happen.” A version of this story appeared in The Washington Post on January 23, 2012.

Change and competition in American higher education
If providers of low- and no-cost online courses can invent credentials that will be accepted by employers in lieu of university degrees, it could forever change the world of higher education. What are the prospects for that? The pros and cons? The potential outcomes? Higher-education leaders and observers weigh in:
Molly Broad, president, American Council on Education
This is a period of significant transformation. I hope [conventional universities] are paying attention to it. We are at or approaching a point of inflection that may have as much to do with modularizing your advanced education—that is, where people are able to snap modules together or link them in ways that produce what are sometimes called stackable credentials. We’re just really in an experimental stage with some of these things. We are in the process of learning more about what works for different individuals with different learning preferences. It is not beyond our reach to think that there will be a wide array of choices that can be mixed and matched by institutions, by other kinds of non-higher-education institutions, and by individuals pursuing independent learning. … The brick-and-mortar campus, and in loco parentis, really now serves only a portion of the population. The challenges that our nation faces on sustaining economic growth and prosperity mean not just that we need to do a better job of raising educational attainment for our kids in K-12 going into higher education, but for adults. There’s not one right answer about the best ways to advance their attainment. There certainly is, I think, going to be competition, and by and large I think competition is a good thing. We hear corporations express frustration that American higher education is not preparing the kind of workforce that they need. I’d like to be able to say to them, ‘Don’t stand on the sidelines. Work with us. We can help you build those credentials inside your organization so you can continue to improve the competitiveness of your workforce and your company.’

The Office of Learning Technologies at the Open University of Catalonia, Spain has published its 2010 Projects Report, which gives an overview of the 30 most important and innovative projects in which it has worked during 2010.
The projects are classified according to whether they are related to educational content (eContent), environment learning (eLearning Spaces), emotional impact of technology (emotion), sense of community (i-Community) or educational technologies.
The aim is to highlight the benefits and current works on technology-enhanced learning and also to help identify potential people and partners with whom the university could collaborate in the future.
In its latest 2010 Projects Report, the OLT outlines a list of thirty projects, classified according to whether they are related to educational content (eContent), learning spaces (eLearning Spaces), affective computing (Emotions), sense of community (i-Community) or educational technologies. All projects are executed with UOC faculty, as well as in collaboration with other universities and companies from the technological field (i.e., Universidad Carlos III, Serious Games Institute, UC Berkeley and MIT).
For more information about the report, read this notice Office of Learning Technologies at Open University of Catalonia (Spain) Projects Report.