Obama's Great Course Giveaway - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Description

Mr. Smith, a veteran of the Clinton- and Carter-era Education Departments, is an open-education evangelist who recently returned to government after serving as education-program director for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The California foundation has funneled more than $80-million into making digital resources like textbooks and lecture videos freely available on the Web.

Mr. Smith has bigger ambitions still. In January he published an article in the journal Science laying out the dream of "a 21st-century library" composed of Web-based open courses for high-school and college students. The courses would be laced with multimedia features and personalized with feedback from computer programs that track student performance. The language coming out of the White House and Education Department today echoes some of the concepts in Mr. Smith's article.

But his article also stacked up the challenges and mixed incentives that the controversial free-knowledge movement must surmount.

Working against open access are "financial concerns, authors' fears of exposing mediocre content, the weight of traditional practice, and legitimate reasons for protecting intellectual property," he wrote. "Some publishers and professional academic organizations believe they have a lot to lose" as open educational resources grow more popular.

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