Such barriers might include high monetary costs, outdated or obsolete materials, and legal mechanisms that prevent collaboration among scholars and educators.Promoting collaboration is central to open education. Twitter: @SocioDictionary Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge.Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal. Some, like Joseph Featherstone, wrote about their experiences; others, such as Lillian Weber and Edward Yeomans, set about to educate or reeducate teachers. Some students do not have access to a high-quality education, but using OERs affords them opportunities to enhance their knowledge independently—in spite of the barriers preventing them from acquiring the knowledge and skills they seek.Open educational resources are most useful when educators Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are online courses accessible to anyone with a computer and access to the Internet. To adherents, proof of success was to be found in the children's enjoyment of school and the high quality of their work. and its Licensors Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal. Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. The curriculum is necessarily flexible, responsive, and organic.A general optimism prevails, both about children's capacity to respond positively to freedom and independence, and about school as a miniature democracy preparing a self-motivated, responsible citizenry.These ideas are grounded in the Progressive philosophy of American educator John Dewey (1859–1952), and in the developmental psychology of Swiss clinician and theoretician Jean Piaget (1896–1980). They also perceived inefficiency, unclear objectives, and what seemed a lack of accountability.In England, such questions had begun in the late 1960s; and, by 1971, a collection of "Black Papers" was published by a group of Oxford and Cambridge intellectuals. At the height of its popularity, the ideas of open education influenced at most 20 percent of infant (ages 5–7) or junior (ages 8–11) schools in England and perhaps half that number of comparable schools in the United States.The open classroom, at its best, is a busy laboratory, richly provisioned with materials for learning. The school is a microcosm of society, not to be separated from the child's familiar context of family, community, social norms, daily life–all areas that children need to confront and comprehend.
If each child is brought into "membership within a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious," Dewey wrote (Dworkin, p. 49). Through exploration and interaction with things around them, children build structures that explain the world and how it works. Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. People call these courses "massive" because their enrollment is They suggest that academic peer review—the process by which professional knowledge producers evaluate one another's work, often anonymously—become more transparent, so readers can better understand how and why, for example, Open education principles are also impacting the academic publishing industry Dissatisfaction with limitations on access to research has spurred various "We recommend exploring resources available from the For more discussion on open source and the role of the CIO in the enterprise, join us at The opinions expressed on this website are those of each author, not of the author's employer or of Red Hat.Opensource.com aspires to publish all content under a