Cape Town Declaration calls for Open Education

A coalition of educators, foundations, and internet pioneers today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, launched 22 Jan, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to everyone online, regardless of income or geographic location. It encourages teachers and students around the world to join a growing movement and use the web to share, remix and translate classroom materials to make education more accessible, effective and flexible.

“Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web”, said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia and one of the authors of the Declaration. “Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.”
Open education makes the link between teaching, learning and the collaborative culture of the Internet. It includes creating and
sharing materials used in teaching as well as new approaches to learning where people create and shape knowledge together. These new practices promise to provide students with educational materials that
are individually tailored to their learning style.

“Open sourcing education doesn’t just make learning more accessible, it makes it more collaborative, flexible and locally relevant,”
said Linux Entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who also recorded a video press briefing (http://capetowndeclaration.blip.tv/). “Linux is succeeding exactly because of this sort of adaptability. The same kind of success is possible for open education.”