Putting Policies into Action: The Costs of Open Education

• I think that the Caswell, Henson, Jensen & Wiley (2008) abstract was misleading. Aside from it being one-sided by only focusing on the positive effects of distance education, there was just one mention of OpenCourseWares, which was the focus of the article. It was really just a reiteration of the introduction paragraph which also does not properly situate the article around OpenCourseWares. This aside, I really like the OpenCourseWares models. I think that technologies like this are actual, tangible initiatives that promote UN’s Article 26. “For the first time, we can now begin to convert a 60-year old-declaration into a reality” (p 10). I do not think that education should be a commodified and sold. However, I do understand that, as mentioned in the VoiceThread, there is a concern for intellectual property. That being said, I do not expect that everyone would want to just freely post their research that they put long hours and hard work into. I’m not sure exactly how this could be addressed, but I do wonder why it’s such a big deal if people are cited. If the production of articles leads to copy right royalties as the production of songs did, I could understand (but it would not change my stance) why people would be more concerned about making sure their research was not available in an open forum. To further compare to the music industry, I believe that often times research is not cited and people do not get credit for their ideas and contributions to the field.