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facilitate scalable and interactive communication around the creation and exchange of usergenerated content. Half of the top-ten most visited websites of the world are social media websites (e.g. Facebook, Youtube, Blogger, Wikipedia, Twitter) and it is estimated that social media accounts for twenty two percent of all time spent online in the United States of America (Nielson 2010: Online).
Consider the following examples of courses offered at no-cost to the learner:
- The FlexiLearn website at Indira Gandhi National Open University provides free and open access to a wide number of degree course materials at the University, and the government is sponsoring tuition services (IGNOU 2009).
- The London School of Business and Finance provides free access to an online MBA course with accreditation options provided by the University of Wales (London School of Business and Finance 2010);
- The OpenLearn initiative of the British Open University reports that over ten thousand students accessing free courses have converted to full enrolled students (McAndrew and Lane 2010).
- Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand have adopted a default Creative Commons Attribution intellectual property policy thus facilitating the potential shift to free access to all courses offered by the institution (WikiEducator: 2011).
- The Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) (See for example: Fini 2009; Parry 2010), which utilise the open web and social media to offer courses to large student cohorts comprising both for-credit and free non-credit students in the same course, frequently registering more than 1,000 learners.
- The University of the People is a non-profit institution headquartered in Pasadena, California, which provides universal access to free-tuition courses having accepted students from 110 different countries. At present the University is not an accredited institution but is preparing to apply for accreditation in the US (University of the People 2011).
- The Saylor Foundation, launched by Michael Saylor, an American entrepreneur with a pledge of $100 million, is building a free university (CNN.com 2000). Currently the university does not have accreditation.
The potential for shifts in the cost-structures for the design, development and provision of asynchronous learning
There are two fundamental changes in the potential cost-structures afforded by digital technologies and open content licensing:
- The marginal cost of replicating digital knowledge is near zero. Therefore, with open content licensing there are significant opportunities to reduce the costs associated with reproducing and maintaining online courses.
- Through networked collaboration, the design and development costs for producing high quality OER can be shared among multiple institutions while retaining the freedom to brand course materials and adapt for local contexts.
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