Why I signed the Cape Town declaration
I’m tired of out of date, expensive textbooks.
I’m tired of fighting copyright fair use battles.
I’m tired of students being trapped in my class, when other students and teachers around the world are grappling with exactly the same issues.
I want easier ways to share the useful parts of my classes with the world.
So I’ve signed the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education. By signing it, I’ve promised to use and improve openly available education resources. I have to release my own teaching materials openly. And I have to encourage USF to adopt policies encouraging open education.
I believe that university teaching is ripe for change. There haven’t yet been any great successes (that I know of) among the projects to create wikipedia-like textbook replacements. It will take a robust online community to make it happen. But once a successful model appears that shows the benefits of a common, open education resource for academic area X, other areas will quickly follow.
I look forward to the day where everything in my class - readings, students assignments, discussions, and projects - is a URL pointing to an open resource.
More on the Open Education movement:
SF Chronicle Editorial - Bringing open resources to textbooks and teaching.
OpEd on Open Content from the ISKME foundation.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 