Essay: Public Policy on OER
October 1, 2009Today, an essay was posted to the Publius Project on “A Brief Overview of Public Policy on OER from California’s Community Colleges to the Obama Administration” authored by Carolina Rossini and Erhardt Graeff of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
This excerpt from the essay challenges the recent open textbook feeding frenzy : “OER encourages and enables the open production, sharing of, and access to educational content and resources. This alone is a valuable societal good, increasing the value of investments made in education. But OER creates the opportunity for a more fundamental and transformative change: the move from passive consumption of educational resources to the formal engagement of educators and learners in the creative process of education content development itself. Thus, the core benefits of OER should probably not be conflated with cutting the costs of materials.”
