8.1 Learning design and open source teaching  (Page 9/18)

This spirit of sharing among educators may change over time as the arguments for a combined non-commercial and commercial grant of up-front rights are made (as it has been made successfully for free/open source software - although it’s worth noting that Linus Torvalds’ initial Linux license had a condition against distributing it for money, and he only later changed to the GPL). For now, I think the deep bedrock of instinctive educator behaviour is to be comfortable with non-commercial sharing, but uncertain what to make of commercial use. And I would add that even if there are some fuzzy boundaries to the limits of non-commercial use, in my experience this does not tend to change the broader spirit of how educators feel about this issue.

(b) I think the concerns about commercial interests making money from an educator’s Learning Design (or any other educational resource) is more about a fear that money is being extracted from users for what would otherwise would be a no-cost resource, and then those revenues could be going to things *other* than the further creation and dissemination of Learning Designs to benefit education (eg, offsetting losses on past failed commercial e-learning initiatives).

My sense is that where there is a virtuous circle between commercial dissemination of educational resources that leads to further funding for creation and dissemination of new resources, then many educators would be (more) comfortable with this situation. But if this is not the case (or even if it is just perceived to be not the case - there is much trust to be rebuilt between educators and commercial interests), I think there is a natural reluctance among educators to trust commercial parties *up-front* to use their content to make money in unknown ways.

Having said the above, I think there is quite a lot of unrealistic thinking about the potential monetary benefits to educators of having their work used commercially. In practice, most publishers I have dealt with tend to only work with quite large “units” of educational content, such as a whole textbook (as the cost of acquisition for smaller units, like individual learning objects, makes them uneconomical). So I don’t see a viable market for individual Learning Designs, at least not for a long time.

However, if you are an expert author of Learning Designs with many existing shared items that are highly regarded, then I think the chances of you being approached by a commercial publisher to create a set of *new* resources for a fee is a more likely commercial opportunity for the short-medium term. In other words, for educators who might like to benefit commercially from the work they share, what matters more is the reputation they achieve from past sharing of good quality work as a basis for new paid work in the future; rather than the idea that an educator would see any significant commercial income straight off the back of existing sharing.

I may be wrong on this, as we really don’t have much practice of any kind to observe yet, but this is my sense of how the relationships between Learning Design authors and commercial interests are likely to pan out in the next few years. I’d welcome feedback and alternative views on this.