TOWARD A UTOPIA: OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN HIGHER EDUCATION Rosanna Mestre University of Valencia Valencia / Spain Rosanna.Mestre@uv.es Abstract Open Educational Resources (OER) is a world-wide phenomenon due partly to the massive impact of the Open Course Ware (OCW) initiative of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) among higher education institutions. OCW has benefits for both institutions and people involved in teaching-learning procedures. But OCW also has some disadvantages and limitations, as currently designed. Some of them might be balanced if decision makers looked at the future from a more ambitious perspective in order to guarantee not only innovation and open content, but also full teaching assessment and accreditation. We offer some reflections on these subjects. Keywords Open Educational Resources, Open Content Ware, higher education, teaching innovation, blended learning, web 2.0 1. INTRODUCTION Open Educational Resources (OER) have recently gained much attention due partly to the massive impact of the Open Course Ware (OCW) initiative of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) among higher education institutions all around the world. Offering open access to course material used by university staff in their teaching was an innovative and attractive proposal. Universities from several countries were pleased with the idea of promoting free, unlimited access to learning and joined the project, forming the OCW International Consortium (OCW Consortium) beginning in 2006. More than one hundred institutions are now cooperating to create a body of content published under Creative Commons licenses by sharing the model developed by MIT. Open Educational Resources have been defined as the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes [1]. The central principle of the OER movement is a simple and powerful idea: “the world’s knowledge is a public good and technology, especially the Internet, provides an unparalleled opportunity to increase access to knowledge and to share it, use it and reuse it” [2]. It offers free access to full courses, course materials, textbooks, learning objects, research papers, tests, videos, software and any tools needed by potential users. Apparently, there would be a wide sector of the population interested in these courses because just by having a connection to the Internet, they can access them for free, without any registration or control system. Who are these users? According to some reports summarized by Charles M. Vest [3], there are mainly three kinds of people interested in these open contents: 49% of independent students, 32% of enrolled students, and 17% of instructors from several institutions. Some projections [4] estimate that the number of students will almost double to reach 160 million by 2025. According to some demographic indicators, these numbers may vary depending on the countries we focus on: while Europe will face a reduction in its young population, other continents like Asia or Africa will see an increase of people with higher education needs. Therefore, even if amounts and percentages can change over time and countries, we may get an idea of the main OER beneficiaries all around the world: a great number of people with higher education aspirations or interests and, it might be guessed, almost all of them unable to afford a college or university degree. Proceedings of INTED2009 Conference. 9-11 March 2009, Valencia, Spain. ISBN:978-84-612-7578-6 002994