While the concept of OER is denotatively a legal one, its implications are first and foremost economic. Open licensing frameworks pose two primary economic propositions:
- Primary economic proposition #1: Educational institutions and educators will need to create different services (given the rapidly transforming market for traditional educational content).
- Primary economic proposition #2: Abandon a free-market approach to education in favour of collaborating to build and share knowledge.
Primary economic proposition #1
As Appendix Five of this Guide illustrates, a wave of open sharing of content is building online with astonishing speed. In this context, the key question for educators and educational decision-makers is really: 'how do we ride it rather than being drowned by it?'
There is a direct comparison to be made between what is happening in the music, film and newspaper industries – among others – and the future of content in education. For example, file-sharing software applications, such as BitTorrent clients, have led to an explosion in the free transfer of music and video files, creating an apparent crisis of business models in the music and film industries. Similarly, running a search on the right Torrent websites will generate, in a few seconds, an extensive list of key medical textbooks freely (if illegally) available for download, together with passwords to access password-restricted journals. This does not mean, though, that the market for educational content and publications will disappear altogether; but it will be comprehensively transformed and different services will need to be created within those transformed markets. The niches for sale of generic educational content will likely become more specialized, while much previously saleable content will lose its economic value.
By way of example, the University of Michigan's on-campus bookshop closed in June 2009 because it could no longer generate sufficient sales. Likewise an article from Tim Barton of Oxford University Press, published in 2009 in the Chronicle of Higher Education,[1] relates an example of students from Columbia University who cited a book published in 1900 rather than the many up-to-date books on the reading list, primarily because its full text was online. Of this, he opined, 'if it's not online, it's invisible'. Bandwidth constraints may make this kind of downloading difficult for some students today (although the costs already make sense if one compares price of bandwidth with the price of some of the more expensive textbooks required in higher educational studies), but the trend towards cheaper bandwidth is clear and will be used by students to access materials, whether this is legal or not.
- ↑ Barton, T, Saving texts from oblivion: Oxford U. Press on the Google book settlement. Chronicle of Higher Education. Accessed January 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/Saving-Texts-FromOblivion-/46966
35
