About the OpenAcademia Network
Formal education is experiencing ever greater difficulty adapting to the changing demands of the market. Lifelong learning has become the new paradigm to stay adapted to the rapidly changing workplace.
Although formal education is still important, a growing number of people are starting to turn to self-learning as a primary source of education. Already 49% of users accessing the MIT OpenCourseWare site are not educators or students, but self-learners.
The Open Access movement is inspiring people to make high quality textbooks, and other course materials, freely available online.
From another front, the Open Source movement has inspired the Open Content and Open Design movements.
Due to the Open Content movement, many Open Access learning materials and resources may now also be freely modified, copied, printed and redistributed.
In order to provide the most benefit to a self-learner, these resources need to be presented in a distance learning format.
We use the name Open Education Resources (OER) for open content and open access learning materials.
Mission
The mission of the OpenAcademia Network is to:
- Provide resources for people to promote OER
- Promote and facilitate autodidacticism and lifelong learning
- Promote open access, open content, open source, and open design for knowledge and learning resources
- Promote the presentation of knowledge and learning resources in a distance learning format suitable for self study
- Promote the use and development of such materials in tertiary institutions