Open, higher education courses are a boon to adults who don’t have the time, money, or confidence to enroll in traditional college courses but want to further their education for work or personal satisfaction. OERu[1] is a great option for these learners. It allows people to take courses assembled by accredited colleges and universities for free, using open textbooks, and pay for assessment only when (and if) they want to apply for formal academic credit.
I spoke with Dave Lane[2], open source technologist at the Open Education Resource Foundation[3], which is OERu’s parent organization, to learn more about the program. The OER Foundation is a nonprofit organization hosted by Otago Polytechnic[4] in Dunedin, New Zealand. It partners with organizations around the globe to provide leadership, networking, and support to help advance open education principles[5].
OERu is one of the foundation's flagship projects. (The other is WikiEducator[6], a community of educators collaboratively developing open source materials.) OERu was conceived in 2011, two years after the foundation’s launch, with representatives from educational institutions around the world.
Its network "is made up of tertiary educational institutions in five continents working together to democratize tertiary education and its availability for those who cannot afford (or cannot find a seat in) tertiary education," Dave says. Some of OERu’s educational partners include UTaz (Australia), Thompson River University (Canada), North-West University or National Open University (ZA and Nigeria in Africa, respectively), and the University of the Highlands and Islands (Scotland in the UK). Funding is provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation[7]. These institutions have worked out the complexity associated with transferring academic credits within the network and across the different educational