The Significance of Open Educational Resources for Schools

        Creating open educational resources for schools is a dream for many educators, government policy makers and educational institutions. Creating open educational resources for schools offer the following advantages:

• Giving free access to high-quality educational resources to teachers and learners, regardless of their physical location
• Having high-quality educational resources that are collaborative produced, localized and adjusted to fit the individual learner's specific needs and context
• The cost of producing these high-quality educational resources is distributed across a large number of institutions and countries
• The maintenance of these high-quality educational resources would be declining rapidly and may even be considered negligible if the trend were to continue

        As of today these conditions of open educational resources for schools only exists in laboratory models. However, in the course of the next several years, it will become possible in ways that will radically affect how educators create and pass on knowledge and how learners absorb them.

        One element that will make this a reality is to provide an open access to educational resources wherein a concept of meta-university will emerge. In this setup, a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic and communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms will be created which will influence the construction or enhancement of higher education worldwide. Computers and the Internet will play a significant role since they will provide the communication infrastructure. Meanwhile, the calls for open access to educational resources for schools and its derivatives will also influence the creation of much of the knowledge and information infrastructure for open education.

        When we talk about initiatives to provide open educational resources for schools, its impact will be significant for learners, educators and educational institutions over the next number of years. These educational resources will have to be widely accessible for users all across the world at little or no cost to the learner.