Dive Summary:
- Pearson is will today unveil its new open educational resources (OER) search engine, Project Blue Sky, which was built with help from Gooru and will allow instructors to search for e-book chapters, videos and online exercise software--additionally returning aggregated results from sources including Harvard Open Courses, MIT's Open Courseware and Wikiversity.
- For a long time, the major publishers brushed off suggestions that OER could undermine their market due to its inherent unreliability and lack of sophistication, but increasing scrutiny over the price of course materials has lead Pearson to serve that demand.
- In addition to returning OER from more than 25 different sources, Project Blue Sky will also feature results from Pearson's catalog, giving users the option to purchase that material instead.
From the article:
If you can't beat them, join them. That is Pearson's latest approach to open educational resources (OER) - the free online learning materials that have proliferated over the last decade and a half, posing a threat to traditional publishers. The education and media company today wil unveil Project Blue Sky, a search engine to help instructors locate free materials from popular OER repositories. The service, which Pearson has built with help from Gooru, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit that specialized in search, will allow instructors to search for e-book chapters, videos and online exercise software. It will return aggregated results from Harvard Open Courses, Connexions, OER Commons, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open Courseware, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, and Wikiversity, among others. ...