When I read a recent article in Tech & Learning about OER Commons, it stimulated my interest in writing an article about how far the OER movement has progressed.
Open Education Global is a member-driven, non-profit organization supporting the development and use of open education around the world. When I served as president at the American Public University System (APUS), our journal editor, Melissa Layne, was a director of OE Global’s predecessor organization.
I placed a pre-publication order for Curtis Bonk’s latest book, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education, and was not disappointed when it arrived. Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, identifies ten key trends in technology that are impacting education as we know it. He has coined an acronym, WE-ALL-LEARN, for those trends that are identified as:
• Web Searching in the World of e-Books
• E-Learning and Blended Learning
• Availability of Open Source and Free Software
• Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare
• Learning Object Repositories and Portals
• Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
• Electronic Collaboration
• Alternate Reality Learning
• Real-Time Mobility and Portability
• Networks of Personalized Learning
