Free and open sharing in education

The idea of free and open sharing in education will be the focus of two weeks of events at the R.M. Cooper Library this month between March 4–13. The event is organized by the library’s Technology unit, instruction team and subject librarians, with support from Clemson University Press, Clemson Online and the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation and is free to attend. Open Education seeks to scale up educational opportunities by taking advantage of the power of the internet, allowing rapid and essentially free dissemination, and enabling people around the world to access knowledge, connect and collaborate. Materials can be translated, mixed together, broken apart and openly shared again, increasing access and inviting new approaches. Perhaps the biggest selling point to this approach is that professors can save students money by switching to high quality, multi-media instructional materials instead of exclusively using expensive textbooks. (The cost of college textbooks has risen over 1,000 percent since 1977, a rate much faster than tuition and other student expenses.)