Excerpted from a contribution by Stephen Downes:

“Education is not something that is simply bought and sold, as a commodity, but rather something a society does to advance its own objectives. That it is, therefore, something too important to be left to the whims of the marketplace. And that the content of an education cannot be determined merely by economic pressures, but by the wider set of values of a society as a whole.

A private company traded on the stock exchange is required by law to maximize profits for shareholders. This often works to the detriment of society as a whole – McDonald’s, for example, maximizes profits by selling people fat and salt, while Coca Cola maximizes profits by selling people flavoured sugar water. We allow this not because it’s more efficient, but because as a society we respect the choices people make. But my the same token, we do not allow people to bottle and sell poison as food. If allowed, free enterprise would undoubtedly offer such a product (generally to be given as gifts, I would imagine). But the social harm that would be caused outweighs the profits to be made.

Most societies have decided that the management of education is too important to be left to private enterprise, that there would be too many poison pills to swallow, and that society would be irreparably damaged as a result. That even if private enterprise were to be able to manage education more efficiently, the product offered would be harmful to society. The United States is almost unique in its belief that these services can be managed by private enterprise. The current crisis in the U.S. education system is good evidence of that, as private educators attempt to finish off the public education system it has been attacking for some decades now.

I get frustrated when I see the same sort of argument posted here or in similar forums (there was a recent troll in WikiEducator to the same effect recently). Education isn’t about making money; the provision of an education isn’t about charity or philanthropy. The large cash donations provided (with strings) by people like Gates or Zuckerberg do more harm than good. The fostering of an educational resources regime where publishers and academics produce, and everyone else consumes, at once promotes their business objectives and undermines our social objectives and disempowers learners as a whole.

We need and must recognize that open educational resources are at once both the product and the property of those people who are intended to learn from them. That our role, as a wider society, ought not to be to shower free resources upon people, in the hope of somehow lifting them up and maybe enlightening them, and certainty of creating lifelong customers, but rather in the fostering of a social, legal and cultural climate where people are empowered and encouraged to create and share artifacts of their own learning. To do any less is to cheat them not only out of their own education but also of their own social values and cultural heritage. The goods Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg would deliver will not do as a substitute for a free and freely-formed curriculum, no matter what the price.”

The above is important in terms of what system we favour for the production of Open Educational Resources.

Stephen Downes:

“There are different models of supporting OERs in education.

For example:

a. the private sector creates OERs, which are purchased by public institutions and distributed for free to students (this is in fact how library books and primary school textbooks are sources in Canada today)

b. the private sector creates OERs, which are purchased by charities and distributed for free to students (this is the philanthropic model; notice how the ‘puchase’ decision-making has shifted from public to private institutions)

c. the public sector (ie., governments, colleges and universities) produces OERs directly, and distributes them for free to students (this is the non-commercial institutional model of OER production in the favour of many today)

d. the public sector (ie., governments, colleges and universities) produces OERs directly, and they are distributed to both commercial and non-commercial education providers (this is the model that requires CC-By licensing, specifically to allow commerical companies to resell OERs at a profit)

The model I advocate is none of these. The model I advocate is:

* e.

(i) the production of OERs is crowd-sourced; public institutions provide policies, (iI) resources and tools to support this production; resources are vetted and selected through a society-wide network-filter process (which is the natural point at which qualified and expert review takes place) and (iii) distributed through the educational process itself.