Open Education

In recent years, open education (OE) has attracted broad attention. Its roots lay in the 19th century when the University of London started to offer “correspondence education” at a distance from the university premises. A digital materialization emerged with the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative in 2001 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), making available all its courses for free on the Internet. In 2008 the University of Manitoba introduced the concept of a massive open online course (MOOC) with a course that drew more than 2,000 participants. It took, however, until 2011 for the MOOCs movement to get a boost with the first really massive MOOC offered by Stanford University, a course on artificial intelligence with 160,000 participants. There is much talk about openness in ...