History
An early example of the principle of open education is the opencourseware program, which was established in 2002 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which was followed by more than 200 Universities and organizations. Similar to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities from the Open Access movement, are the goals and intentions from Open Education specified in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. MOOC is a more recent form of online course development getting more attention since the fall of 2011 which was followed by a number of non-certificate-granting programs, including edX, Coursera and Udacity.
Even before the computer was developed, researchers at public universities were working at educating citizens through informal education programs. In the early 1900's, 4-H clubs were formed which taught youth the latest in technological advances in agriculture and home economics. The success that the youth had in utilizing 'new' methods of farming and home economics, caused their parents to adopt the same practices. As the 4-H club idea was spreading across the country, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act which created the Cooperative Extension Service in the United States Department of Agriculture. The Cooperative Extension Service is a partnership between the USDA, land grant universities in each state, and counties throughout the United States. Through the work of the Cooperative Extension Services and 4-H, people throughout the United States have easy and inexpensive (most often free) access to the latest research done at the land-grant universities without having to visit a college campus or attend college courses. The educational programs and resources offered by 4-H and the Cooperative Extension Service meet people where they are at and offer them the opportunity to learn what they want to know when they want to know it. In order to meet the changing needs of citizens and the use of new technology, the Cooperative Extension Service has created eXtension. eXtension provides research based, non-biased information on a wide variety of topics to people through the use of the internet.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)