I just wanted to highlight a great post by Denis Saulnier on Open Education. He does an excellent job of outlining the history of and basic ideas around open education.

http://saulnier.typepad.com/learning_technology/2011/03/open-education.html

It’s also not a head-in-the-sky puff piece. Personally I like the idea of Open Education and Open Educational Resources but in my areas of interest in particular, Multimedia and Web Design, the offerings are often out of date and lackluster. There are also technical challenges that haven’t been fully addressed. From the article:

There are some significant technology challenges associated with the sharing and re-use of learning resources.  Learning object interoperability has been a failed goal for years.  Proprietary learning management systems (LMS) and competing technical protocols and standards have contributed to the difficulty in deploying and sharing learning content in predictable and standard ways (see early blog entry on one example of this: an exploration of the SCORM and IMS standards).

Also it was good to see that I was not alone in thinking that, in the near future at least, it makes more sense to focus on smartly using existing, widely used, standards:

Some notable thinkers in the Open movement feel that rather than trying to create/herd people into any one of the competing platforms/standards, we should instead focus on adopting and using those platforms and standards that are already ubiquitous among students and educators. So use: Google instead of complicated repositories; tagging instead of complicated technical metadata standards; RSS feeds instead of complex cataloging protocols; HTML and ZIP instead of protocols like SCORM and IMS; folksonomies instead of ‘official’ ontologies; and wikis/blogs/social networks instead of LMS platforms. David Wiley makes this point (along with many other great points) in a Slideshare presentation entitled Openness and Analytics: The Future of Learning Objects.

If you’re interested in Open Education but aren’t fully versed then it’s a great read.