Money, Money, Money

Listen to this as you read. (Thanks to Pink Floyd for allowing this official version of their music video to be embedded free of charge.)

All I could think of as I was reading our two articles for this week was how it all comes down to money. As Friesen stated in his article of open educational resources, “the clear sustainability lesson from both this listing of inactive projects and the earlier listing of active efforts is the importance of ongoing, operational institutional or consortial funding for educational resource collections and the difficulty of realizing alternative funding models. . .  Only projects that are large-scale, well-funded, and able to benefit from a first-mover advantage (i.e., being one of the first of their kind) seem to have any chance of developing collections whose scope extends to all educational subjects.” Even some of the ‘long-lasting’ projects he had listed were now defunct. MIT’s project has been successful as it fits Friesen’s criteria. The school itself has benefitted from enrolments from students who upgraded or became involved in the school because of their OER resources. I found it interesting that faculty also said they benefitted from creating the online resources as it made them update their practice. But they were staff and expected to create these resources as part of their job, therefore they were paid for their work AND the larger entity, the school, benefitted from their OER.

Harvard’s Project Zero was also successful and obviously underwritten by a post-secondary institution. It was “founded by philosopher Nelson Goodman at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1967, Project Zero began with a focus on understanding learning in and through the arts. . . . we continue to work towards a more enlightened educational process and system that prepares learners well for the world that they will live, work and develop in.” Yet other universities struggle.  Almost ten years after the Friesen article, Canole and Brown stated in their 2018 article,  “firstly, incentives and rewards (should) be put in place both nationally and institutionally to celebrate the development of open practice innovations and technology-enhanced learning interventions.” So how do we expect underfunded public JK-12 education to embed open education?

An interesting associated read was noted by someone in my twitter feed: a blog written by David Wiley, “the Education Fellow at Creative Commons, an Ashoka Fellow, and adjunct faculty in Brigham Young University’s graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology, where he is part of the Open Education Group (and was previously a tenured Associate Professor).” It was on the UNESCO OER recommendation. The highlights of the article were:

The public draft included a definition of OER as follows:  Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license… Open copyright licenses provide the public with free and perpetual permissions to:

• • Retain – the right to create, own, and control copies of the content;
  • Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways;
  • Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself;
  • Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new;
  • Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others. . . .

The final version includes this definition of OER:  Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license… Open license refers to a license that respects the intellectual property rights of the copyright owner and provides permissions granting the public the rights to access, re-use, re-purpose, adapt and redistribute educational materials.

OER are still defined in terms of copyright – either (1) in the public domain or (2) released under an open license. But the characteristics required to make a license an “open license” have been absolutely eviscerated.

The strong requirement that the public be permitted to retain OER – that is, “the right to create, own, and control copies of the content” as per the public draft – has been replaced in the final version with the indescribably impoverished requirement that the public be allowed “access” to OER. . . (This) . . . creates a policy loophole large enough to drive a multi-national publisher through, . . . (while also) . . . creating the possibility that an author could potentially charge an annual fee for a license to materials and still call them OER. . . (A final concern is that) . . . if money becomes available under a funding program based on the Recommendation, many of the organizations who apply for that money will absolutely be asking themselves “how much can I get away with and still comply with these rules?”

Disappointing. There is always some company willing to capitalize on education while those developing the resources and aiming to help their students get paid a paltry amount in comparison to Big Business.

So now what? Well, we teachers keep on doing as we are doing, and encourage our governments to put the costs of educating its population above the self-interested pockets of the businesses that want to make money off of education—let them wait and make money off properly educated people that they employ.