06 March 2012, 09:54

This week is Open Education Week

Open Education Week Logo In the week of 5-10 March, several events are being organised all over the world as part of Open Education Week. Many of these events take the form of webinars, but there are several real life get-togethers happening as well, mostly in universities and similar locations. Open Education Week is run by the OpenCourseWare Consortium and is being supported by several companies and organisations, including Google, Creative Commons and the United Nations University.

The common goal of all these events is to further the public's understanding of the use of open tools and publications in education. The open education movement is generally considered to have been largely fuelled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which started to publish its teaching materials free of charge as OpenCourseWare as early as 2002; a formal definition for the movement was later codified in the Cape Town Declaration of 2008.

More information about the open education effort in general can be found on the Open Education Week web site.

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