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As part of the Administration’s ongoing efforts to help Americans obtain the skills they need to acquire good middle class jobs, Vice President Biden dropped by a meeting with a group of business executives from leading information technology companies.

The Vice President highlighted the importance of making sure our training efforts teach skills that are in demand by employers. He also encouraged the participants to expand initiatives that have proven successful, including partnerships between companies and community colleges to teach workers new skills. The group discussed how increasing the availability of on-the-job training opportunities -- like apprenticeships -- can help Americans find employment and ultimately widen the aperture into the middle class.

The Vice President is working with private companies, non-profit organizations, federal agencies, education institutions, state and local leaders, and others across the country to make the workforce and training system more job-driven, integrated, and effective.

The United States is deeply concerned that the Turkish government has blocked its citizens’ access to basic communication tools.

We oppose this restriction on the Turkish people’s access to information, which undermines their ability to exercise freedoms of expression and association and runs contrary to the principles of open governance that are critical to democratic governance and the universal rights that the United States stands for around the world.

We have conveyed our serious concern to the Turkish government, urge Turkish authorities to respect the freedom of the press by permitting the independent and unfettered operation of media of all kinds, and support the people of Turkey in their calls to restore full access to the blocked technologies.

On March 17, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Data & Society Research Institute, and New York University co-hosted the second in a series of public events focused on big data that Office of Science and Technology Policy is co-hosting with academic institutions across the country.

The full-day workshop focused on the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of big data. The day concluded with a public plenary session, featuring an active discussion with a panel of experts covering a range of issues including privacy, the use of genetic data, educational applications, and financial inclusion. The webcast of the public session, as well as materials from the day’s workshops will be available here.

We will continue to build on the ideas developed in the first two workshops at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University at a third event on April 1st in Berkeley, California. This workshop will be co-hosted by OSTP and the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, and will focus on the values and governance issues raised by big data technologies.

Open Educational Resources (“OER”) are educational resources that are released with copyright licenses allowing for their free use, continuous improvement, and modification by others.

The world is moving fast, and OER enables educators and students to access, customize, and remix high-quality course materials reflecting the latest understanding of the world and materials that incorporate state of the art teaching methods – adding their own insights along the way. OER is not a silver bullet solution to the many challenges that teachers, students and schools face.

But it is a tool increasingly being used, for example by players like edX and the Kahn Academy, to improve learning outcomes and create scalable platforms for sharing educational resources that reach millions of students worldwide. To drive accessibility and quality, and to make these resources permanently renewable, the program contained the innovative requirement that all new intellectual property paid for with grant funds be openly licensed for free use, adaptation, and improvement by others.

The first Federal grants for OER under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT) program were made in 2010; altogether the Federal Government has invested $1.5B to build, develop and expand academic and job-training programs that help students and unemployed workers secure good jobs in growing, high wage industries as quickly as possible. These investments are creating a new pipeline of high-quality OER that will come online for free use in waves over the coming months and years.

Building on this record of success, OSTP and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are exploring an effort to inspire and empower university students through multidisciplinary OER focused on one of the USAID Grand Challenges, such as securing clean water, saving lives at birth, or improving green agriculture. This effort promises to be a stepping stone towards leveraging OER to help solve other grand challenges such as the NAE Grand Challenges in Engineering or Grand Challenges in Global Health.