OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
- What are our Goals?
- The Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources Initiative seeks to use information technology to help equalize access to knowledge and educational opportunities across the world. The initiative targets educators, students, and self-learners worldwide.
- Why are we funding OER?
- At the heart of the movement toward Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge. OER are the parts of that knowledge that comprise the fundamental components of education—content and tools for teaching, learning, and research.
- What Do We Focus On?
- We support the development and dissemination of high-quality content; innovative approaches to remove barriers to the creation; use, re-use, and sharing of high-quality content; and projects that seek to improve understanding of the demand for openly available content.
We have conducted our review of several of the larger projects, a scan of all of the funded projects through the study of internal Hewlett documentation, external releases, and the websites of most projects. We participated in site visits to MIT OCW,[1] Rice Connexions Project,[2] and Utah State[3] and participated in several of the emerging OCW Consortium[4] meetings. We have had ad hoc discussions with several of the leaders of current major grants and extensive discussions with each other as well as with Marshall Smith and Catherine Casserly.
1.2 Approach and Structure of the Report
In Section 2 we will review the portfolio of OER grants to date in the context of the overall Technology/Open Educational Resources Logic Model and the description and goals above. From 2002 to the present the Hewlett Foundation has invested about $68 million in the OER program. We will comment on the distribution of grants across the various activities of the model, focus on important successes, and note areas that need more attention. We will particularly emphasize the unique contributions that Hewlett investments have made in both launching and moving forward the OER movement. We believe
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