Everyone Has the Right to Education.

I have always been interested in following OCW initiatives of one type or another (many can be found here). They range from small sites, like iBerry, to huge university repositories such as MIT OpenCourseWare or the UK's Open University. For the most part, these large sites make available courseware that was created for funded students by paid academics. Non-paying remote learners are inevitably left on their own as far as important parts of the educational process are concerned, such as expert tuition, assessment or interaction with fellow students. Sometimes an attempt is made to involve OCW users, by providing a discussion forum but in my experience these forums are frequently empty or peppered with plaintive but unanswered pleas for basic assistance.

Recently, some other education sites have gone one or two steps further. A very impressive example is Connexions, "an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone ....... organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license." (Further info available here) Much thought has obviously been given to setting up this scheme and bringing together users in their different roles as authors, instructors and learners.

It is early days of course and the current evolution in the use and dissemination of open educational resources is encouraging but I look forward to a greater coming together of the different parts of the open global educational network. At present, a learner may well find ideal courseware on one site but probably also an empty or non-existent forum there for discussing work with other students let alone experts. He or she might then exercise initiative and find a lively forum on another site but equally well could make a bad misjudgment about the scope or quality of the discussions. Some sort of overall mentoring process is needed, offering advice, guidance and encouragement to the learner at whatever level and without fear or favor in regard to the vested interests of existing institutions.

Perhaps some sites should specialize as repositories while others provide support for student interaction, social and academic. Yet others (existing institutions?) could take on the thorny question of assessment and maybe some nodes (portholes?) of this futuristic education net could address the mentoring function by co-ordinating and drawing together the facilities provided by the others in order in order to create and maintain a personalized learning environment for whoever, whenever and in whatever language. A pipe dream? Perhaps, but if "Everyone has the right to education" as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares, the time of the Free and Open Global Education Network must surely come.