$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be 'Windfall' for Open Online Learning - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
This gets my stamp of approval. In case anyone needed to know. Tell the White House I’m good with making educational resources freely available online to drive down costs.
Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be—if it comes at all—remains unclear.
One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet.
That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT’s plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT’s radical idea as official policy—dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses.
“With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan’s agency is working with the Labor Department on the program.
With feds support, will open education have it’s Sputnik moment?
