Refining open education: New book on field is free online

October 10, 2008

In the spirit of open education, MIT Press and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have published a new book about the movement and made it available online, free of charge.

The book, "Opening Up Education," contains a collection of essays about the benefits and challenges of creating open-education programs. Such initiatives typically put course content online, in the form of lecture notes and multimedia presentations. "But it's not about just making things freely available," said Toru Iiyoshi, one of the book's editors and a consulting scholar for the Carnegie Foundation. It's also about "making things more transparent ... so that people can better understand how to improve education."

Ultimately, Iiyoshi hopes the book promotes conversation between the three groups who work in open education: technologists, content creators and educators. "My personal motivation is to bring these three communities together to find common issues and build on each other's work," he said. Readers have already submitted a number of questions to the book's online discussion forum, which launched Oct. 2.

A hard copy of the book can be purchased, but those who prefer an electronic copy can access the book for free online . "We wanted to stay true to the spirit of open access," said Vijay Kumar, co-editor of the book and director of MIT's Office of Educational Innovation and Technology. The two versions should appeal to different markets, he said. The digital version can be searched by keyword and contains extensive links, while the paper copy will be particularly handy for those with slow Internet connections.

Kumar said open education is needed now more than ever, in part to keep education relevant to a new generation of students. There's a lot of informal learning going on via social networks and they should be leveraged through open-education programs. There are also growing communities of students who wish to learn but cannot be supported by traditional infrastructure. In India, for example, Kumar said there simply aren't enough secondary schools.

But developing open-education programs can be difficult. One of the key challenges addressed in the book is sustainability. "It's important to ensure that material created with one set of technology is not rendered useless to the next wave of technology," said Kumar, who also sits on the advisory committee for MIT's OpenCourseWare project, which has made a wealth of content freely available online to learners from around the world.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 5, 2008 (download PDF).