It has been 10 years since the Cape Town Declaration described a “a global revolution” in which “educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go”. Back then I suggested that readers of this blog sign the Declaration and many did.
Many people, some whom I know and too many whom I don’t who have made remarkable contributions to realising the world described in the Cape Town Declaration. Here is a non-representative sample of accomplishments by people who participated in the “small but lively meeting” that gave rise to the Declaration. Mark Horner built Siyavula which offers OER textbooks (8 South African curriculum aligned STEM books) and a practice service for South African high school students that will be extended to Nigeria this year. Philip Schmidt started P2PU. Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams built a developing world network Research on Open Educational Resources for Development. Cheryl reflects on her own experience since the Declaration here.David Wiley launched Lumen Learning which has already save college students in the United States millions of dollars through providing Open Educational Resources for their colleges.
But there is one issue which has seen surprisingly little progress over the last 10 years. For the world described by the Declaration to become a reality for millions of students and teachers all over the world the Declaration points out that it is necessary that “taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources”. Through the heroic efforts of Cable Green and others there have been important pioneering projects in which there has been public funding for Open Educational Resources. But there is far too little discussion in the OER movement of the idea that taxpayer funded educational resources should be available to taxpayers.
The Declaration sets out three strategies to realise the world it describes. The third strategy reads:
“Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections.”
At the time the Declaration was drafted I was dubious about prefacing ” taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources” with “Ideally”. Would those who stand to lose out on profits or power agree in principle but then eviscerate the application by claiming less than ideal circumstances every single time there was a possibility that tax-payers might be able to use the resources which were created with their money? That hasn’t happened yet. In years of research on open educational resources as a public policy I haven’t encountered any actual arguments for why taxpayer funded educational resources should not be open in principle. Nor have I encountered arguments that taxpayer funded resources should be open but not in particular circumstances. Instead of arguments there has been a continuation of the previous system, unexamined, unquestioned.
This will only change when people who agree with the Cape Town Declaration insist that taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.
CPT+10 sets out how this can happen.
