Quest 0.1 - A (Very) Brief History of Open Education

"Carefully review at least 50 pages of historical information on the open education movement. Write a brief summary post on the history of the movement."

The modern history of the Open Education movement essentially began in 1992 with the development of the internet.  While some may argue this point, I believe it is true to say that, despite the existence of all the prerequisite conditions for the formation of the OE movement, the absence of the internet (or some other medium serving the purpose currently served by the internet) would make the very idea of an open education movement an impossibility.

Prior to the existence of the internet there were a number of other technologies for the purpose of mass dissemination of information.  Among these communication technologies were the printing press, the radio, the television, and, yes, smoke signals.  Many different types of media have been used over the centuries for the mass dissemination of information.

The internet is similar in this regard, and yet remarkably different.  Whereas the average viewer of television has no control over television broadcasts, the internet gives anyone and everyone the chance to be a writer and a publisher, an actor and a video producer.  It has become a community where everyone is entitled to express one's ideas and feelings.  It has become a community of sharing.

It should not be surprising then, in the midst of this burgeoning, open, sharing culture of the 1990s, that we find organizations like the Free Software Foundation (Richard Stallman) and the Open Source Initiative (Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens), who felt that these same principles of openness and sharing to apply to the disclosure and distribution of computer software source code.  Over time, this open source code movement met with great enthusiasm from many in the software development realm.

In 1998, a young graduate student named David Wiley was pondering on the success of these principles of openness in the software development industry, and asked, essentially, if these principles of openness and sharing could not perhaps just as well apply to educational content.  After some thought and discussion with both Stallman and Raymond, Wiley decided to create and champion a license agreement for content (the OpenContent Principles / License, or OP/L), which would do essentially the same thing for content that Stallman and Raymond had done for computer software source code.

Wiley's idea began to gain momentum, and in due time other content licenses were created.  Among them the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Creative Commons licenses.  As these ideas of open content grew larger and more widely known, people began to recognize the mutual benefits of publishing content under these new "open" licenses.  Individuals, universities, and organizations began publishing open content of many different types and of varying quality.

In 2000, UNESCO hosted a conference around this theme of open content and coined the term "Open Educational Resources" (OER).  At this conference they also promoted the idea of distributing these resources on a global scale.  The Open Education movement was well under way.

Since that time, Open Education has become a matter of serious and important consideration for individuals, private organizations, universities, and government entities, as people attempt to overcome the obstacles that have arisen along the way.  Among the greatest of these obstacles are copyright and licensing issues, sustainability issues, questions of quality and assessment, and interoperability issues.  Until these issues are solved, much thought, research, and effort will be poured into their investigation in the hope that a practical, agreeable, sustainable method of OER production and distribution will be achieved, and that the Open Education movement will ultimately be able to bring higher education to all the world.