This week’s course material was focused on a talk by Cable Green on the value and current state of Open Educational Resources (OERs). What I found immediately apparent is just how openly anticapitalist the whole exercise is. The problem OERs exist to solve is how the profit motivation of private companies who keep work locked behind paywalls serves to stem innovation and disrupt the effective function of the government in delivering public education.
Knowledge is as close to free to distribute as it will ever get. As Green lays out, the emergence of the internet eliminated the need for information to be shared by physically printing out and shipping content, but corporations who dealt in education still needed to be able to sell it. The scarcity that the internet effectively eliminated was preserved through the holding of rights; if the resource is unlimited, you limit it through restrictive access to keep the price up. Digital textbook leasing programs are essentially the educational equivalent to the De Beers corporation withholding their diamond stock in a weak market to keep the prices up.
This locking down of information stifles innovation. Having no access to research across a scientific field means slower progress and expensive redundancies in different organizations doing the same work. With course materials having such high cost, keeping textbooks up to date either costs schools too much or students too much, and this makes education less accessible, which means we get fewer qualified people growing up into important fields. Pursuing profit motive means making everything cost as much as you can get away with, which means locking things down wherever you can, which means slowing society down.
We know that OERs save students money. Green states that the OER program he built up earlier in his career saved students an estimated $100 million. Before this $100 million was saved, it was not being thrown into a pit. It was money increasing the profits of textbook publishers. In a capitalist system where trickle down economics still has a hold in many peoples minds, at least on some level, that money being taken from the bottom line of big publishing companies being framed as an obvious good for society is refreshingly honest. This represents a major paradigm shift where the good of society is able to be unapologetically put before profit motive while still saving governments an enormous amount of money. It may lead us to ask what other resources are not as scarce as they need to be and where else making those resources publically available might be a strong avenue for putting societal well-being above corporate interests.