The economics of openness in higher education

The debate about economic globalization, open education, and public spending has been growing. There has been a transformation in the relationship of the universities to government and in their internal dealings for planning, management and resource allocation. Today, universities the world over face the difficult challenges of meeting the need for productive employment, including the adoption of information and communication technologies for offering their present face-to-face programs, while at the same time operating flexible and lifelong learning programs, which encourages global competitiveness, networking, and partnership. In order to meet this challenge, it has become necessary for universities to restructure, reengineer, and reform their practices. Information systems educators and others in similarly professional disciplines will benefit from an alternative infrastructure for learning. By creating, the ???open classroom??? model in higher education, which integrates ???open??? technologies to create ???knowledge products??? which completely engages the students and provide value to the institutions and nations. It is because of this essential need for globalization and open education that I explore these essential ideas. The problem is that open source/access models are struggling against the neoliberal concept of privatization and monopolization. I argue that there can be a practical solution for having open source/access models and the need for privatization of knowledge. I argue that the knowledge economy in the global economy will be the driving change in utilizing open systems, open learning systems have a great impact on higher education, and that the economics of education needs to address knowledge production and ownership. The research conducted is a case study involving an assessment of three institutions (MIT, Harvard, & Princeton) open access policies and their approaches to Intellectual Property in higher education. The implication for this research is for a better understanding of open access policies in higher education and learning way of developing and implementing Intellectual property policies for students, faculty, and institutions