There is a huge amount of public interest in recent initiatives from MIT and Stanford in the development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and in open educational resources such as Apple’s iTunes University and the Khan Academy. There are also less publicized, but equally interesting, MOOCs such as Change11 developed by enterprising Canadian and American thought leaders such as George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Curtis Bonk. Other significant developments are the OERu, which is aiming to provide formal accreditation based on open educational resources supplied by a number of ‘open’ universities, and collections of OER materials for specific markets, such as OER Africa. Some of the promoters of these initiatives and the mainstream media tout these developments as ‘revolutionizing’ higher education, and as bringing higher education to the masses.

Keywords

accreditation · government · MOOC · Ontario