OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
3 The Brewing Perfect Storm
3.1 Introduction
The Hewlett Foundation has been a major force in creating an OER movement that will yield benefit into the future even if Hewlett now exits the field. But doing so would forfeit an extraordinary opportunity and responsibility to leverage its investments to both deepen and broaden the impact of the OER initiative.
We are advocating investments to achieve more pervasive access to OER and are advocating an initiative aimed at deeper impact on learning. We advocate an initiative, building on OER, to create a global culture of learning. A culture of learning, or what some might call a learning ecosystem,[1] is targeted at preparing people for thriving in a rapidly evolving, knowledge-based world. This world demands creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism from all of us. This approach is very much in the spirit of what Marshall Smith and Catherine Casserly are saying in the context of their talks with titles like “The Old and the New: A Learning Revolution,”[2] in which they focus not on marginal change in the educational system and school, but rather on ways to use technology to create powerful improvements in learning. For example, wireless and mobile phone technologies offer new opportunities for OER access, especially in the developing world.
The OER initiative has been a vehicle for building a culture of sharing. We now propose that OER be leveraged within a broader initiative—an international Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) initiative (to be described in Section 4) for building a culture of learning. This is a risky undertaking, but we believe that conditions now exist to make it compelling. In this section we survey threads of activities that, like OER, are individually significant but if combined together would be far more powerful. Figure 4 illustrates a framework of enablers, transformative initiatives under way and proposed, and grand challenges that are elements of a possible perfect storm of innovation in discovery and learning.
- ↑ Further consideration in the future of the analogs between a learning ecosystem and a natural ecosystem may be productive. Ecosystems are characterized by interdependency, diversity, complex composition, variation in granularity and scale, adaptive (plastic), and evolving. Other important concepts in ecosystems are key species, energy cycles, key elements, and food webs.
- ↑ http://www.ced.org/docs/report/report_ecom_openstandards.pdf
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