The Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus has a new post on Chris Anderson’s (editor of Wired magazine) assertion that lectures should be freely available online. Anderson presents fairly typical arguments in favor of OCW and OER, such as benefits to instructors and institutions. The comments from some critical of open education are helpful in understanding differing viewpoints. Readers are cautioned about Anderson’s new book, which is surrounded by plagiarism concerns. From the blog post:
Though Mr. Anderson is hardly the first person to praise free lectures online, he fits it into a broader argument that such radical pricing of information is pretty much inevitable. His theory is that the Internet makes information so easy to distribute (and to pirate) that the best business response is to make it free and find some ancillary service to sell instead.
