Tag: open education

HE in an open market

Required reading from Richard Hall – impassioned, angry and reasoned response to the HE White Paper.

Higher education is explicitly a commodity now. It is explicitly open to market forces and for-profiteering. This exposes it to risk, hedging, venture capitalism, and the treadmill of competition. This means that all of the social relationships we develop and nurture within higher education are subject to the rule of money. There is no outside this exchange mechanism that frames how we relate, as Capital turns back in on what it terms ‘the developed world’, in order to accumulate [our mutual futures] by dispossession through debt-driven consumption.

via learnex.dmu.ac.uk

And, as he says, we need to struggle for an alternative.

Brightworks: An Extraordinary School

Brightworks is a school that reimagines the idea of school. In September 2011, we will offer a one-of-a-kind K-12 curriculum: students explore an idea from multiple perspectives with the help of real-world experts, tools, and experiences, collaborate on projects driven by their curiosity, and share their findings with the world. Brightworks does away with tests, grades and homework, instead supporting each student as they create a rich and detailed portfolio of their work. Brightworks offers a sliding-scale tuition option to all applicants.

At Brightworks, we believe that a school should serve as a learning commons and a community workshop, an intellectual and creative heart of the neighborhood it resides in. Brightworks will also offer after-school, evening and weekend workshops for children and adults.

everything is interesting, we can build anything

via sfbrightworks.org

MIT OpenCourseWare: A Decade of Global Benefit

Among the many milestones we will celebrate during the Institute’s 150th anniversary next year, I am particularly proud of the tenth anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare, the start of which was announced on the front page of The New York Times on April 4, 2001. Since the announcement, MIT has published materials from more than 2,000 courses, presenting the undergraduate and graduate curricula from all 33 of MIT’s academic departments through the OCW Website (ocw.mit.edu). By the anniversary, these materials will have been visited more than 100 million times by an estimated 70 million individuals from nearly every country. More than 200 other universities around the world have joined MIT in publishing their course materials freely and openly, and have collectively published materials from more than 13,000 courses. This dynamic community, the OpenCourseWare Consortium, will gather on the MIT campus shortly after the anniversary to look back at the movement’s first 10 years and look forward to the next decade.

via web.mit.edu