I think the shift towards open access of research articles pawed the way for being more open also in other parts of academia and in knowledge production. You can clearly see that open access articles are being more downloaded and also more cited than when papers were locked behind pay walls. Perhaps also learning materials can go the same way. As a principle, I think that would be fair. At least if you operate on public funding it seems fair to give something back to the community and in some communities open learning resources might be the only way to reach large parts of the population. Or to reach rare and hidden parts in any population.
But I can se some problems. While my research papers are being published efter being peer reviewed by others there is no similar quality check at the moment for publishing open learning stuff. I can just create something, license it and put it out there. It will be up to the learner to evaluate the quality. Or perhaps some kind of social evaluation can take place like when someone put out an evaluation of a restaurant or a hotel.
Another potential problem that I can see is that of maintenance. Perhaps I have had the funding to develop my learning material that I publish as a free resource but some of the stuff will probably grow old and become increasingly outdated. I probably should feel that i have the moral responsibility to keep my material updated, but will I have the time (money) to do that. Should I let the stuff be totally free in the hope that someone else comes along and update? I am not that bothered putting things that I do out there for free. I have a small free “course” on how disability organisations could use statistics to strengthen their advocacy work for better living conditions for people with disabilities. It is quite popular, but I don’t know who uses it. I can only see in the visitors data that it is used. And it hasn’t been outdated yet.
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