Aaron Swartz.  For many of us his name invokes feelings of sadness and frustration. A visionary and an idealist, Aaron fought for open access by downloading 4 million JSTOR documents through the MIT servers with the intention to freely distribute them. While these documents are freely available to MIT students, faculty and staff, Aaron’s tactics resulted in a costly legal battle. Faced with 35 years in prison and a fine of $1 million dollars, this brilliant young man committed suicide. Whether or not you agree that the penalty was disproportionate to the crime, this controversy has sparked discussion on the role and importance of access to information and open education.

At Prepr we believe the call for a world of open education has come. Will you answer it?

Instead of shedding tears now is the time for hope and action.

There is hope because together we can answer the call to create a world of Open Education. Act now, join the movement.

If you ask 100 people what Open Education means you will get 100 different answers (tell us: what does it mean to you?). However, even if we use different words we will often agree on the core elements:

  1. Open Education is accessible, it requires nominal resources and is freely available
  2. Open Education is empowering, the knowledge and skills obtained are relevant and useful to students
  3. Open Education creates the possibility for global collaboration, both between educators and between students.

The idea of Open Education is not new, in 2000 Open Courseware Consortium began offerring free educational material. In large part, this became a reality because technological advances allowed educators to offer entire courses with minimal costs.

In 2010 we created Prepr Foundation. It is distinct from the other organizations as a ‘by the people, for the people’ non-profit, and our approach is inherently collaborative. Our mission is to create a hub of educational content that will be distributed through an Open Education Platform: Open Prepr.

It takes 1000 people to start a movement, join Prepr and together we can continue Aaron’s legacy. Open Education, Join Prepr.