Higher education is now almost absurdly expensive. In an effort to reduce the cost of developing and delivering educational material, there are a number of initiatives around open curricula right now. The idea is that content generated by the academic community can be made freely available so that professors and publishers don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. It’s basically a commons for educational content. The folks at the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (who have a pretty great blog on this subject) call it “OER.” Ultimately, advocates like CCCOER hope to make higher education more accessible. The Open College Textbook Act of 2009, for example, notes that 200,000 students do not enroll in a higher education system due to the cost, which includes an average annual textbook budget of $805 to $1,229. The bill appropriates $15 million in 2010 for one-year grants to anyone who wants to create open content.
A few weeks ago, the Obama administration announced a $12 billion investment in community colleges, and $500 million of that is allocated to sponsoring the creation of open courseware. As described by Inside Higher Ed:
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
