Why I signed the Cape Town declaration

Posted By: jpallen June 4, 2008

I’m tired of out of date, expensive textbooks.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.

Open Education Resources: OERCommons.

Connexions Repository (Business).

2 Comments on "Why I signed the Cape Town declaration"

  1. Pat Hoaglin | June 5, 2008 at 7:46 pm |

    Hey JP,

    I think open education is definitely going to take over the current teaching formats in the near future. There is a really great example in Wikinomics of how this is beginning to take shape at MIT. Students from around the world can access the university’s complete course materials online without having to pay tuition fees. “‘MIT OpenCourseWare supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century.'” (Wikinomics, 23). Hopefully USF can begin to build its own open course information to support both USF students and aspiring intellectuals around the world.

    MIT OpenCourseWare:

    http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

  2. Tiago Alves | June 16, 2008 at 2:30 am |

    Hi JP, I like the idea of having all course material available online and open to the world community. That would really help poor students from around the world access content that they would never have access to otherwise.

    Regarding the text books, I agree 100%. That is why I always bought the soft cover, international version of my text books. They were supposedly illegal in the US but they cost me 50% less! 🙂

Comments are closed.