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:
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)