Access to Knowledge Initiative

The mission of Brigham Young University is to assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life. Because "it is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance" (see D&C 131:6), working to help each of our brothers and sisters gain access to knowledge is vitally important. Access to Knowledge is one of the Four Moral Dimensions of Teaching upon which the David O. McKay School of Education and the Center for Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling are founded.

The Access to Knowledge Initiative draws on a wide range of disciplines as outlined in the Initative Objectives (in sidebar at right). We consider at least three kinds of Access to Knowledge:

1. 1. learner access to educational materials,
2. 2. teacher access to information about learner performance, and
3. 3. learner access to information about their own performance.

Current and recent research includes projects examining:

1. - the long-term sustainability of university-based open education initiatives,
2. - the use of educational analytics / educational data mining to determine the effectiveness of online curriculum,
3. - the use of learning analytics / educational data mining to enable just-in-time individual tutoring (with the goal of finding a teaching model that can achieve Bloom's 2 sigma performance improvement threshold in a public high school level),
4. - issues of textbook affordability,
5. - sustainable business models supporting the creation and distribution of open source textbooks,
6. - institutional policies dealing with open access to research and open educational resources,

The A2K Initiative coordinates the MSE Open Learning website which features open courses and other open educational resources from the David O. McKay School of Education. We also lead Open Education News, an observatory which collects, analyses, and publishes news from the areas of open education and open learning, with support of the Open Society Institute.