Submitted by David Wiley (not verified) on Thu, 10/11/2007 - 2:46pm.
Jennifer - absolutely excellent summary. You hit several key points in your analysis, including "I wonder how these open education spaces would evolve if the funding
sources shift focus?" and "If you take
the time and money (apparently thousands of dollars per course) to make
an existing courses content "available", why on earth would you not
design it to also support your own online or blended learning
initiatives?"
The answer to the first question is - we're about to find out. The funding can't last forever... In fact, several of us are already operating on the assumption that the funding targeted at building new content has basically run out. USU's OCW has been running without foundation funding for a while now. MIT OCW is now trying to figure out how to support a 4 million dollar / year operation with grant funding, and while I full expect them to succeed in figuring it out, I don't expect it to be easy for them.
As to the answer to the final question, I expect it has more to do with people not understanding that resources are revisable and remixable. Even if you want to be "original," there's still lots of value in starting from somewhere. I think the problem here is the "ubiquitous assumption of full copyright."
Jennifer - absolutely excellent summary. You hit several key points in your analysis, including "I wonder how these open education spaces would evolve if the funding sources shift focus?" and "If you take the time and money (apparently thousands of dollars per course) to make an existing courses content "available", why on earth would you not design it to also support your own online or blended learning initiatives?"
The answer to the first question is - we're about to find out. The funding can't last forever... In fact, several of us are already operating on the assumption that the funding targeted at building new content has basically run out. USU's OCW has been running without foundation funding for a while now. MIT OCW is now trying to figure out how to support a 4 million dollar / year operation with grant funding, and while I full expect them to succeed in figuring it out, I don't expect it to be easy for them.
As to the answer to the final question, I expect it has more to do with people not understanding that resources are revisable and remixable. Even if you want to be "original," there's still lots of value in starting from somewhere. I think the problem here is the "ubiquitous assumption of full copyright."