Open House - April 2001
VC's Column
Your course: open as to source?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) caused a stir in early April by announcing that it was making all its electronic courseware available free. My e-mail, both at the OU and UNESCO, hummed as people around the world drew this development to my attention. In reality, the OU had this issue on the agenda before MIT. In a strategy paper that I presented to Council in March I urged that the OU experiment with this concept, which already has keen supporters among our academic colleagues.
The trend today, seen most clearly in disputes about the results of research on the human genome, is to make knowledge a proprietary commodity. This is at odds with the long academic tradition that knowledge should be freely available. For the OU to espouse the open source movement for its courseware could be a powerful statement of principle. It would also help to bridge the digital divide that threatens to split the rich and poor of the world on a new dimension.
The open source movement has its roots in the academic community and the belief that key intellectual tools should be made readily available and refined by the collectivity of their users. In the case of software the source code is made freely available so that anyone who wishes can improve on it and develop applications – provided that they in turn make the results of their work freely available. This approach has produced software that is often more robust and reliable than proprietary products.
In terms of courseware the idea would be to make our web-based teaching material freely available for people to use and improve on provided that they in turn made their adaptations generally available.
Such an approach is, of course, the precise opposite of what most other universities were doing, at least before the MIT announcement. Most institutions that are developing web-based courseware seriously are taking a very proprietary approach. They hope, without much supporting evidence so far, that they can make substantial money by selling on their courseware to other institutions.
To take the opposite approach would certainly be consonant with OU philosophy and values. For the OU to take an open source approach would put us on the moral high ground, attract a committed following of like-minded academics around the world, and place us in a role of academic leadership. If we believe that our main added value lies in our student support, assessment and awards then making raw courseware available should not erode our market.
My new involvement with UNESCO shows me another dimension to this debate. UNESCO’s charter begins with a commitment to the free exchange of ideas and knowledge. For that reason the trend to make knowledge proprietary is a worry, and potentially yet another way for rich countries to suck money out of poor countries. For this reason UNESCO strongly espouses the open source movement for software and would be pleased to help extend the concept to courseware.