• http://www.campus-technology.com/news_article.asp?id=18547&typeid=155

In this brief overview of the Open Education movement, Rice University's Richard Baraniuk frames the opportunities and challenges that face initiatives to globally share self-created educational materials. He writes that the goals of this movement are:

• To bring people back into the educational equation - particularly those who have been "shut out" of the traditional publishing world, like people who don't read and write English, scientists and engineers out in industry, and talented K-12 teachers.
• To reduce the high cost of teaching materials.
• To reduce the time lag between producing course materials and textbooks and getting them into the hands of students.
• To enable re-use and re-contextualization such as translation and localization of course materials into myriad different languages and cultures. 
  

He lists the challenges that this movement faces, which include the familiar problems of:

• re-usability (including a nice critique of .pdf)      
  
• the fragmentation resulting from institutional repositories organized not by discipline but by institution
• the costs of infrastructure (especially in developing nations)
• intellectual property concerns (including a nice but too-brief critique of the commonly-held, holier-than-thou repudiation of commercial licensing of educational materials)
  

He suggests how his own grass-roots Connexions project tackles some of these challenges, while also pointing to the need for more top-down approaches to the creation of a vast library of open educational materials, and lists MIT's OpenCourseware project as an example of a centrally-managed approach.What is missing from his description is a good explanation of how to create these materials in the first place; while almost any educator will agree that sharing educational materials is a good thing, there needs to be something worth sharing. He hints at one solution in his poke at those who subscribe to a non-commercial universe of educational publishing, but it would be good to hear more about how he thinks this universe of high-quality, re-usable materials will come into being. Tools such as those provided by Connexions allow subject specialists to author their own multimedia materials, but (in my unscientific analysis) these materials often are constrained by the page/textbook metaphor, and do not offer the same level of interactivity and rich media that materials designed by a team that includes graphic designers and programmers. Such materials cost more to produce, but they (perhaps) have a greater chance of re-use.