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Open Source Learning

The readings and discussion this week has mentioned several projects and resources that I have never heard of. The reading mentioned Project Gutenberg, a collection of over 60,000 public domain books, all cultural artifacts that are being digitized for public use and preservation. I am amazed that I have never heard of this project before, after all my BA is in History, this kind of thing is right up my alley. There was also mention of Open Course Ware, which was kick-started by MIT's Open Course Ware program in 2002. 

I took a few minutes to browse MIT's course offerings and I am simply amazed at the amount of knowledge and resources that are free to access and use. As a historian seeing this type of work makes me proud, it is deeply rooted in historical and societal traditions to pass down knowledge and expand access to knowledge. Without the expansion of travel and trade and without the invention of the printing press it is hard to believe that society would have progressed forward in such rapid fashion. These projects are providing the same benefit, allowing more people to access information and expand their knowledge, improve their communities, and make new inventions to bring us forward. 

I started to wonder what other open-source educational projects exist because it is clear that I am behind the knowledge curve.  This is when I found a Ted Talk by Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk.  Richard speaks about how he is working on software to help increase this spread of knowledge and he calls it building a "knowledge ecosystem" using textbooks, that can be shared, remixed, re-used. It seems very similar to Open Educational Resources, but his project is called Open Stax. I took some time to browse and found resources that I will be using next year in my high school sociology and psychology classes. 

As a high school teacher, my motto is "don't reinvent the wheel" so when I need to find something for my classroom: a lesson plan, a reading, a video, etc. I usually go to Teachers Pay Teachers, which is a website for teachers to share their content, but it functions as an online marketplace where teachers can sell their content to other teachers for a license to use. I have colleagues who have made some real money selling entire courses and units on TpT but I have never sold my materials there because I don't believe that I should be making other teachers pay for my work- I would rather the idea of reciprocity was reflected in our shared knowledge and resources, not money. 

It seems that if more people were knowledgeable about open-source learning, with both the resources that already exist and the possibilities, it would benefit all of society. I am curious why there doesn't seem to be more of a push or following behind this movement? Do the big textbook publishers have too much say in educational policy, perhaps? 

Comments

  1. DesmondJune 14, 2020 at 4:30 AM

    I find the open education movement to be very exciting. I love the idea of more people having access to knowledge.
    As a historian you will probably enjoy Archive.org too. They have made it their mission to make an archive of all of the worlds digital information. You will find books, movies, games, software, and even old versions of websites. It is pretty great.
    Enjoy!

    ReplyDelete
  2. LeeJune 25, 2020 at 11:08 AM

    Do you know Librivox https://librivox.org/? It's like the audio book version of Project Gutenberg, improving accessibility of the resources.

    ReplyDelete

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