Open Ed: Quest 5

As you hopefully know, I am working in a guild with Justin Johansen and Sara Joy Pond to create an open “financial literacy” class for high school students. We have taken the Utah state standards and divided out the objectives. Mine focus on investment and retirement. I searched through oerrecommender.com, wikieducator and discovered.creativecommons.org to find resources. I also remembered hearing about a personal finance site created by a BYU professor. I was able to locate both the site and its creator. I sent him an email to see if he would visit with me about opening up the content. I had not heard back after a few days and so I called him and we had a great conversation. The upshot of the matter is that he is very open to it. He had not heard of creative commons nor MIT OCW, but it seems like he wants to share his work as widely as possible as long as it is used non-commercially. It is a very comprehensive course and includes assessments. I believe that for me personally, I enjoy and think it is better to find complete courses and be instrumental in setting them free than to piece together modules from a variety of sources. I’m hopeful that a productive conversation will ensue, setting some content free!