Open Education Practices: A User Guide for Organisations/Foreword

During the early years of the 2000s, the words "open education" were only heard in the context of the broader phrase "open educational resources." This usage pattern unfortunately focused the minds of people almost exclusively on content, subtly nudging them away from considering the broader potential for the application of the principle of openness in education generally. And while OER are a critically important portion of modern educational infrastructure, they are only that - infrastructure.

Across a variety of contexts, the development and availability of high quality infrastructure is important for enabling valuable services and facilitating innovation. Education is no different. As OER became more widely available in the mid-2000s, thinking began to extend to open education itself - the practices, policies, and pedagogies that enable the sharing of OER as well as the new practices, policies, and pedagogies enabled by OER. This book describes some of these practices and policies.

I hope this book will help bring us to a time when institutional policy and government requirements encourage us to focus on the principle of openness as much as we currently focus on the principle of diversity. I hope this book will encourage people to broaden their thinking about openness and education. But most importantly, I hope this book will help bring people to the understanding that OER and openness are a means only and not an end, and that the only worthy end is a student who has learned something they find valuable. To the degree that applying the principles, practices, and pedagogies suggested by the principle of openness help learners learn things they value, we should all work to make openness a core value of our education institutions.

David Wiley, 2011

David Wiley
David A. Wiley is an Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University. He is originally from Barboursville, West Virginia, where he received his undergraduate degree in vocal performance from Marshall University in 1997. He later earned his doctoral degree in Instructional Psychology and Technology at BYU in 2000. He is also Chief Openness Officer of Flat World Knowledge and founder of the Open High School of Utah. He was previously Associate Professor of Instructional Technology, and Founder and Director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL), at Utah State University. He has received the National Science Foundation's CAREER award and served as a Nonresident Fellow of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Fast Company rated Wiley #78 in a list of the top 100 creative people for 2009. Wiley was also named a Peery Social Entrepreneurship Fellow in the BYU Marriott School of Business in 2012. (Wikipedia 21 November 2012)