Introduction - christine geith

I want to welcome Christine Geith and thank her for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Her post is scheduled to appear on February 1st, 2008 (eastern U.S.). Christine will be writing about how OER may be shaping the future of a new type of university. Will online learning go away? is there a new opportunity to serve an underserved market? Can current institutions in higher ed figure out how to use these new resources as part of current business practices? The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement around the world is rapidly gaining momentum and taking shape. For example, the Open CourseWare Consortium is scheduled to officially become a non-profit association during the next couple of months and already has over 170 institutions around the world sharing over 5,000 courses. This week, the Cape Town Open Education Declaration officially launched its global call to action. Corporations with content are starting to get involved. Governments are declaring OER as key strategies. And, ideas for new OER universities are emerging.

I met Christine over a year ago at a meeting organized at the Commonwealth of Learning , where we discussed the use of MediaWiki and related FLOSS technologies and free cultural works for eLearning to reduce access barriers to education. I am very much looking forward to Christine’s posting, which will point to something that a lot of folks have been talking about, few institutions have commitment to, and no institutions, that I am aware of, have used as first principles when founded. Christine captures this with an intriguing question, “ Can the OER movement birth a new university? ” Please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.