OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
in the humanities. The e-science activities are directed at meeting grand global challenges through more effective science and engineering, at enhanced innovation, and at maintaining leadership in a global knowledge-based economy. A spin-off of the science-focused cyberinfrastructure activities has been a growing focus on the role of technology in enhanced scholarship and learning in the humanities and social sciences. All of this is fueling reflection about augmented models of the university of the future, including the concepts “engaged universities in and of the world” and “meta-universities.”[1] And we are proposing that Hewlett lead a complementary “open participatory learning infrastructure” initiative. In Figure 4, we also suggest that Hewlett will be able to identify and leverage other initiatives in the world yet to be discovered. There is huge potential synergy between these initiatives and the challenges they are targeting to meet.
So we are situating the proposed OPLI with other transformative initiatives, empowered by common enablers, that like the OER, are well under way and potentially highly synergistic, namely
- the worldwide e-science movement, or what is called in the United States cyberinfrastructure (CI)-enabled science;
- the less developed and funded, but potentially high-impact movement concerning CI-enhanced humanities.
These initiatives are all in service of meeting international, strategic societal grand challenges, namely
- to significantly transform effectiveness of and participation in scientific discovery and learning;
- to enable engaged world universities, meta universities, and a huge global increase in access to high-quality education; and
- to create cultures of learning for supporting people to thrive in a rapidly evolving knowledge-based world.
We believe that the Hewlett Foundation in concert with other investors and stakeholders could make a major contribution by defining and leading the OPLI initiative and linking with the other two initiative areas in ways that contribute to meeting all three of the grand challenges. In the remainder of this section we elaborate on the elements of the framework in Figure 4.
- ↑ Charles M. Vest, “Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University,” EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2006, http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0630.asp?bhcp=1.
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