A note on the title
The “lockers” in the title is best read as an image: learning resources that were once kept in one place and used by whoever could get to them. It is not the name of a historical program. What follows is the more general story of how access to learning materials widened, and the dates are given only where they are well established.
Shared physical resources
Long before the internet, communities pooled books and teaching. Subscription and lending libraries spread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Britain, mechanics’ institutes began appearing in the 1820s to offer evening lectures and libraries to working people. Public library legislation followed in several countries; the UK’s Public Libraries Act dates from 1850. These institutions did not use the word “open”, but they rested on the same idea: knowledge should not be reserved for people who can afford to own it.
The limits were practical. You had to live nearby, visit during opening hours and use the single copy on the shelf. Sharing meant sharing a physical object.
Study by post and by air
Correspondence education loosened the link between learning and location. Isaac Pitman is commonly credited with teaching shorthand by post around 1840, and the University of London began offering external degrees in 1858, allowing students to study without attending. In the United States, summer assemblies and extension programs at the end of the nineteenth century, and later the cooperative extension system created by law in 1914, took instruction beyond campuses.
Broadcasting added another route. Radio and later television carried educational programs from the early and middle twentieth century. The Open University in the United Kingdom was chartered in 1969 and enrolled its first students in 1971. It combined printed materials, broadcasts and tutors, and it admitted students without the formal entry qualifications that most universities required. That is a clear milestone for open admission, though not for open licensing.
Software gives openness a legal toolkit
The next step came from computing. In the 1980s and 1990s, free software and open-source communities showed that people could share work under licenses that permitted copying and modification, while still protecting the author’s attribution. The phrase “open source” became common in 1998. In the same year, David Wiley proposed the term “open content” and an early open license for educational materials. This borrowed legal structure is a large part of why open education looks different from earlier forms of distance learning: it is about permissions as much as access.
The web and the first open courseware
The World Wide Web became publicly available in the early 1990s, and by the end of that decade universities and individuals were putting teaching material online. A widely noted moment came in 2001, when a major US university announced it would publish materials from its courses for free; publication began in 2002. Creative Commons, founded in 2001, released its first licenses in December 2002, giving educators a standard, readable way to say what others may do with their work.
In 2002 a UNESCO forum on open courseware adopted the term “open educational resources”, which is still the standard name. Declarations followed: the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, drafted in 2007 and published in early 2008, and the Paris OER Declaration in 2012. UNESCO’s member states adopted a formal recommendation on open educational resources in November 2019.
Open courses, then a push for practice
The acronym MOOC was coined in 2008 for an openly offered online course. A few years later, in 2011 and 2012, free online courses from universities attracted very large sign-ups, and 2012 was widely described as the year of the MOOC. Completion rates were typically low, and the hype cooled, but the idea that a course could be open to anyone with a connection stayed in the system.
Alongside courses, the late 2000s and 2010s saw more attention to open textbooks, open policies at institutions, and “open pedagogy”, in which students help create public material. The shift of emphasis was from putting content online to changing how people teach.
What the pattern shows
Three points stand out from this timeline.
First, change was gradual. Each step reused the previous one: libraries, then correspondence, then broadcast, then the web, then licenses.
Second, access and permission are separate things. A public library gives access but not the right to copy and remix; an open license gives both.
Third, new technology did not remove old problems. Gaps in connectivity, language and time still shape who benefits, a point the digital divide makes clear.
Dates to treat with care
Many popular timelines compress or embellish this history, or claim a single “first”. Where sources disagree, treat the claim cautiously. If you are citing a date, check it against a primary source such as the institution’s own record or the text of the declaration.