As students, we go through secondary school and look into the possibility of post secondary and divert into our ideal career paths. However, there is the possibility that post-secondary is expensive and not ideal for people who can’t afford it. They decide not to go through with their post-secondary education because of factors such as tuition and textbooks and how expensive they can get (i.e. On average, textbooks cost up to a total of $900) (Belliston, 2009). However, there are some resources that are available that help to lower the cost of how much people will have to pay for post-secondary or not pay at all, while being educated. These resources are called open education and are accessible to those who cannot afford to pay the full expenses of post-secondary, but would like to learn to a higher degree.

When it comes to open education, they are online resources that are available to anyone who chooses to view it and are free. In a sense, they are not as free as it suggests, due to the copyright laws in place (Carroll, 2013), but they are resources that don’t need to be paid for. Overall, they are free for people to use them as study tools and to benefit them as a student and learner to pursue a higher education without having to pay expensive fees.

One of these websites that supports free resources for learning is called Creative Commons and is accessible online. On this website, people can sign up and share their works with each other completely free. By having a website like this, it enables a type of learning that can be accessed without the price fee. Instead of having a 300+ page textbook that was written by professors and other scholarly minds, you could have a different kind of e-textbook written collectively by people who are like minded.

Not only is this non-profit organization a great way for people to learn without having to pay expensive fees, but also good trying to benefit people morally. By sharing different types of works that are created by you, it is giving the opportunity for people to learn what you’ve done to potentially build and expand your initial idea.

In general, open education is a concept that revolves around the fact that education shouldn’t have to be so cost expensive. There should be no reason that you won’t be able to get a satisfactory education if you can’t afford it; by having the option of open education resources like Creative Commons, it let’s learners freely learn and be creative. To an extent, this is essentially an online community being built, through the eyes of creative minds, and all share one goal together. That goal is to share like knowledge with each other, and help each other when someone is struggling to comprehend information or because of other situations (i.e. Financial) that they can’t get knowledge else where. Ultimately, open education is a resource that should be taken advantage of and something we should support as a community so that we can help and build upon each other.

References:

Belliston, C. J. (2009). Open educational resources: Creating the instruction commons. College & Research Libraries News, 70(5), 284-303.

Carroll, M. W. (2013). Creative commons and the openness of open access. New England Journal of Medicine, 368(9), 789-791.