Open Education

I believe open education is a wonderful idea. I once took a meteorology class that was heavily based on computer programming. The professor of the course would often remind me that if I was stuck on a piece of code to search the web first for a solution before asking him to help because it's most likely somebody else had the same program you have and has already posted the solution. I believe open education fits right into this category. If universities are posting information that others can view, the information is most likely helping other people learn. Not only can this information be beneficial to college students, faculty and alumni but I also believe that this information will be beneficial to the general public as well. This in turn I believe may cause a chain reaction to start where one university posts open content, then another university posts more open content to complement the original content, which in turn may cause this library of information to develop open for anyone to view. While some may say that sharing information from universities to the public for free is unfair since students pay thousands of dollars per semester to access the same information, I say it's harmless. It's harmless because even if the public has access to the shared information, the public still won't be able to earn a degree like the college students nor can the public obtain as much information through the shared information that is presented in a college classroom.