Stated differently - Assuming the freedom culture achieves a free version of the education curriculum, what are the implications for your institution?
Misrepresentations
I do not use non-free software because I do not want to face the ethical dilemmas arising from the tensions between honesty and educational service when helping my neighbour. As an educator, I do not want to be tempted into the illegal reproduction of software or closed learning resources when helping a learner. As a teacher, I don’t want to be in a situation where I must refuse access to knowledge at the expense of helping someone to learn or for that matter earning a living. It’s a personal choice. Sometimes my choices are a catalyst for emotional debate among my peers. In these situations, I frequently make statements that challenge the hegemony of closed content and the traditional pedagogy we have grown accustomed to in education. On the rare occasion, what I say is used out of context fueling misrepresentations. I’d like to set the records straight. I’ll concentrate on two examples.
It’s far better to have a poor quality educational resource that is free, than a high quality resource that is non-free
Yes, you’ve guessed it — I have been accused of disregarding quality and its importance in education.
I usually make this statement challenging those OER projects that have adopted the Non-Commercial (NC) restriction in their choice of license. First of all, quality has nothing to do with the freedom of a resource. In my experience of education, quality is a function of the design and processes implemented during the development of those resources. Quality is not a function of the commercial restrictions placed on a resource. In fact, these commercial restrictions limit essential freedoms to widen access to education, not to mention the incompatibility with the growing number of resources available under free content licenses which you can legally mix and match. Free content must be available to sell because we should not deny any individual the freedom to earn a living. This is the cornerstone of a modern economy. Besides, competition encourages quality and I would argue that we should encourage commercial activity to promote the quality of free content.
However, my major concern is the waste of human effort in many OER projects which essentially render the products almost useless for the very people they are intended to serve. I’ve yet to find a set of lecture notes developed by another teacher that I can use without the need for adaptation for my local context or personal style of teaching. The problem is that adaptation requires effort and consequently incurs cost. It would be nice if I could find bits and pieces of free content that I could mix and match thus reducing my personal effort in the adaptation process - in other words creating a digital mash-up from free content for my learners. The problem with the NC restriction is that you cannot mix the NC materials with any of the “copyleft” content licenses because you are creating a derivative work. Effectively the NC restriction shuts off modifications and adaptations by leveraging on the availability of existing investments in free content.