Athabasca+University

Este escrito citado textualmente del libro Theory and Practice of Online Learning, Second Edition, AU Press, Athabasca University, 2008

" This book is written in large part by authors from a single university – Athabasca University – which has branded itself “Canada’s Open University.” As an open university, we are pleased to be the first such institution to provide a text like this one as an open and free gift to others. The book is published by Athabasca University’s AU Press, one of the world’s first open-access presses. It is published under a Creative Commons license (see http://creativecommons.org) to allow for free use by all, yet the copyright is retained by the university (see the copyright page for license details). This open-access license format was chosen for a number of reasons. First, it is true to the original spirit of a university, and especially of an open university. We believe that knowledge is meant to be shared, and further, that such sharing does not diminish its value to its creator. Thomas Jefferson eloquently expressed these ideas in 1813 when he wrote, He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. (1854, pp. 180–181) As you will see from the quotations and references that augment the text in most chapters, we have learned much from the works of others, and thus feel bound to return this gift of knowledge to the wider community. Second, we believe that education is one of the few sustainable means to equip humans around the globe with the skills and resources to confront the challenges of ignorance, poverty, war, and environmental degradation. Distance education is perhaps the most powerful means of extending this resource and making it accessible to all. Thus, we contribute to the elimination of human suffering by making as freely available as we can the knowledge that we have gained from developing distance education alternatives. Third, the Creative Commons license provides our book as a form of “gift culture.” Gift giving has been a component of many cultures; witness, for example, the famed Potlatch ceremonies of Canadian West Coast First Nations peoples. More recently, gift giving has been a major motivation of hackers developing many of the most widely used opensource products on the Internet (Raymond, 2001). Distributing this text as an open-access gift serves many of the same functions that gift giving has done through millennia. The gift weaves bonds within our community and empowers those who benefit from it to create new knowledge that they can then share with others and with us. Interestingly, research on neuro-economics is showing that freely giving and sharing is a behaviour that has had important survival functions for humans groups since earliest times (Grimes 2003). David Bollier (2002) argues that gift cultures are surprisingly resilient and effective at creating and distributing goods, while protecting both long-term capacity for sustained production and growing cultural assets. Bollier also decries the private plunder of our common wealth, and discusses the obligation of those employed in the public sector to ensure that the results of publicly-funded efforts are not exploited for personal gain. Open-access gifts also provide those from wealthy countries with some small way to redress many economic inequalities and to share more equitably the gifts we receive from our planet home. We hope especially that this text will be incorporated as an open educational resource into the syllabi of the growing number of programs of distance education study that are being offered by both campus and distance education universities throughout the world. In the words of Sir John Daniel, President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning, sharing offers a viable means to “increase the quality and quantity of electronic courseware as materials are refined, versioned and adapted by academics around the world and made freely available in these new formats” (Daniel, 2001, p. viii). We believe that the free sharing of course content is a powerful tool to encourage the growth of public education institutions. We also think that such sharing will not result in a net value loss for the delivering institution. Rather, its reputation will be enhanced and its saleable services will increase in value. Fourth, providing this book as open access frees us from potentially acrimonious debates over ownership, return for value, and distribution of any profit. Educational books rarely make large profits for their authors, and most of us have personally witnessed the old aphorism that “acrimony in academic arguments runs so high because the stakes are so low.” Open-access licensing allows us to go beyond financial arguments that are likely to have little consequence in any case. Finally, our experience with the first edition has proven that open access allows the work to be more widely distributed and read. Through this dissemination, the ideas proposed are exposed to critical dialogue and reflection. We hope that much of this commentary will make its way back to the authors or flow into the discussion forums associated with the text’s web site. Through review within the community of practice, ideas are honed, developed, and sometimes even refuted. Such discourse not only improves the field as a whole, but also directly benefits our work at Athabasca University, and thus handsomely repays our efforts. In summary, we license the use of this book to all – not so much with a sense of naïve idealism, but with a realism that has been developed through our life work – to increase access to and opportunity for all to quality learning opportunities.