Can Universities Finally Learn to Share Before Facebook Does It for Us? | Education in the Time of Corona

"...Facebook’s play to outsource graduation feels much like an online program management company’s move to make university curricula ready for online prime time -- a bringing in of the big guns in order to do the thing up right. But more fundamentally, Facebook’s transformation into the OPM of graduation compels us to consider a thornier question: maybe Facebook is on to something. Should universities be duplicating effort and stretching limited finances in the middle of a global crisis, or should we think about ways that we might join forces to be more than the sum of our individual parts? ...

For decades, educational activists have been developing open educational resource libraries -- banks of syllabi, lectures, exam questions, images, charts and other materials to be used in classes. One of the most ambitious efforts to create open resources is MIT’s 2001 OpenCourseware project, which put the university’s entire curriculum online, causing engineering schools around the world to remake their own rosters and course modules...."