How much worse will these same countries treat new immigrants arriving who say they have learned all they know from social networking sites? From sites that carry course materials created by people unknown and who have no institutional accreditation in their home country, and no form of certification of the education they have gained? Open educational practitioners need to remember that just pumping out half-baked content is not enough. Content needs a structure around it, and that includes providing the credibility to people who take the trouble to study the content.

If you are a creator of open content, would you employ a person for a highly skilled job who carries no institutional credentials, but lists courses they have self-studied on social-eductional-networking sites? Be honest! These sites are great for teachers scavenging for content if they have the time and connectivity, but they are not going to fly when it comes to credentialing people who need it. It makes people look like they have bought their qualifications on one of those internet sites we hear about in our spam folders all the time. Open content by big institutions is a great idea.

Keep up the good work UKOU, MIT and others. Your materials can be used by teachers for courses that people can study, be examined on and get qualifications. And maybe one day these qualifications will jump borders the way they should be able to.

Mike, what would be really helpful is to point to some OCW examples that do not ask instructors to publish in one centrally provisioned infrastructure (like educommons or the MIT platform) or that aggregate open content from different places under a central institutional banner. I’d really like to see working examples of what that looks like in an OCW project, and hopefully in the “wide variety of implementations” there are a few illustrative examples. That would be helpful.