Education is expensive. Not only is it expensive, but costs at some U.S. universities are skyrocketing at ten to twenty times the current rate of inflation. To give you an example, I’ve been attending Michigan State University since August of 2002 (four years as an undergraduate and two as a grad student). In that six years, tuition for in-state undergraduates has jumped from $179.75 to $277.50 per credit hour. That’s an increase of over 60% in 6 years—obviously our current system is not sustainable.

Now, there’s no single solution that will fix the sorry state of education in the United States, but looking to open courseware (OCW) as a model might be one place to start. For those that aren’t familiar with OCW, think of the open source software model applied to educational material. Basically, universities and other educational institutions agree to publish a selection of their course content on the Internet, free of any restrictive licensing and openly available to the public. The published courses are not intended to be part of a degree-granting program, but rather a way for universities to contribute to a network of free, high-quality educational materials.

The Open Source Model

To give you an example of how OCW could change the face of education in the U.S. you only have to look as far as the open source software community. Open source software is driven by collaborators from all over the World, free to the public and in most cases better written and more secure then its commercial counterparts. Open source has proven that there does not need to be lucrative financial incentives to get developers to contribute code to projects. There is an aspect of social responsibility and a “give back” mentality that drives most people to contribute their time to projects. So why can’t we think that OCW could have the same effect on education that open source has had on software development? We have the resources, some of the brightest researchers and academics in the World call the U.S. home. What we don’t have is a national agenda focused on educating the population. That’s clear given that we spend about four cents of every tax dollar on education and about 50 cents of every dollar on national defense.

Open courseware is not the cure-all. It will not fix our current education crisis, nor will it make us all Rhodes Scholars. What it will do though is make people aware that education shouldn’t be a privilege for just those who can afford it—it should be something that is universally accessible to everyone, regardless of their nationality, economic status or place in this World. We have to start somewhere, and the more knowledge we can make freely accessible means more knowledge that would otherwise be out of reach to most people.

Learn more about the open courseware movement:

• The Open Courseware Consortium
• MIT Open Courseware
• Open Education