A striking similarity of all these examples of Open Education Projects is that they keep a strong altruistic flavor. I find this the most refreshing aspect of the Open Education Movement because it is such an unusual and powerful philosophy in our world of gain, greed and selfishness. They are also all large-scale, well-funded initiatives, that have the ability to set a new benchmark for OER and Open Education on a global scale, particularly with regard to higher education.
These projects are differentiated according to the way they host their content and the ways that they target users. I am especially interested in the UNESCO Open Training Platform because of the content areas of which they focus.
However, I believe there is still an overriding accessibility issue with regard to all of these platforms. I think that those who are most ready to benefit and those who have already benefited from educational privilege. I feel that there are gaps which could be addressed collectively by these players (and the OCW Consortium generally) in order that more users from "outside" can benefit by these amazing repositories of resources. I believe this includes "breaking down" the content to make it more useful in "chunks" with ample meta-data to find the resources.
Awareness activities and sensitization on the part of communities is also essential to inform them of existing resources and further training to help them know how to access the tools and how to localize them, share them, and re-use them (and then share them back to the larger group/repository). This component surely takes funding and it is something I am eager to work toward to bridge that gap between those who would like to use theses kind of resources (and whose lives could be saved because of such knowledge) once it is placed in the right hands.
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