Free Content ≠ Good Education: OERs and the Developing World

Neil Butcher lives and works in his home country of South Africa. Amongst other functions, he is responsible for managing the national education portal, Thutong, for the South African Department of Education. He is also involved in several OER projects in South Africa, as well as across other parts of Africa.

An abridged version of this article appeared as a "Fair Comment" piece in the June 2007 issue of Connections.

When I first started working in education, the concept of open learning, although used for many years, was just gaining significant global attention and functioning as an effective drawcard for funding in the developing world. The term fascinated me because it seemed to encapsulate a series of concepts with real potential to transform the operation of education systems for the better. However, somewhat despairingly, I witnessed a growing cooption of the term to serve the narrower interests of specific groups within education systems. I eventually gave up using the term, despite its transformative potential, when it became inextricably integrated into the marketing lexicon of distance education systems, many of which I knew to be inherently 'closed' in their design and operations. It saddened me to see genuine efforts to use a defined conceptual framework to improve education sacrificed to narrow 'business' interests in this way.

Sadly, I fear we may be witnessing a similar trend with the debates surrounding the concept of Open Education Resources (OERs), most notably those revolving around licensing. In a nutshell, the concept of OERs describes educational resources that are freely available for use by educators and learners, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees. As the COL Statement on Copyright illustrates, a broad spectrum of licensing frameworks is emerging to govern how OERs are licensed for use, some of which simply allow copying, others which make provision for users to adapt the resources that they use. For me, the power of this concept revolves around three linked possibilities:

1. Because OERs remove restrictions around copying resources, they hold potential for reducing the cost of accessing educational materials. In many systems, royalty payments for text books and other educational materials constitute a significant proportion of the overall cost, while processes of procuring permission to use copyrighted material can also be very time-consuming and expensive (although some commentators have tended to overestimate the extent to which content is a cost driver in education by assuming that free content is almost synonymous with free education).
2. The principle of allowing adaptation of materials provides one mechanism amongst many for constructing roles for learners as active participants in educational processes, who learn best by doing and creating, not by passively reading and absorbing. Content licences that encourage activity and creation by learners through re-use and adaptation of that content can make a significant contribution to creating more effective learning environments.
3. Finally, OERs have potential to build capacity in developing countries by providing educators access, at low or no cost, to the means of production to develop their competence in producing educational materials and completing the necessary instructional design to integrate such materials into high quality programmes of learning. Many educational systems are foundering because their employees have become so overwhelmed by administrative tasks that they have lost the time and space to exercise this critical creative capacity, and it will take time and investment to rebuild it. The concept of OERs has potential to facilitate this if the process of developing educational materials is seen as being just as important as - maybe more important than - the final product.

So, how is the concept being robbed of its transformative power? Predictably, the concept is the subject of significant resistance from organizations whose business models are based on ring-fencing and selling content. This struggle is playing itself out in many industries, not just in education, and is to be expected when new technologies make it possible to do business in new ways. Unlike other people confidently predicting the demise of all old forms of information production because of short-lived social trends, I suspect that there will be winners and losers, with many publishers and other similar agencies reinventing themselves, continuing to provide valuable products and services, and running successful businesses. Chris Andersen's analysis of the potential of exploiting the 'long tail' of consumption demands provides good examples of new business models emerging that reflect this reality.^[1]

However, the transformative potential of the concept is also under attack on other, less obvious fronts. The first of these is the tendency, repeated so often throughout history, of actors based in the developed world to adopt powerful concepts and preach their power on behalf of the developing world. So, several accounts describe how OERs will act as the 'saviour' of education by producing masses of free education content (usually in the developed world) and then making it available for use in the developing world. Like many well intentioned 'movements' that have preceded the OER movement, the history of development tells us that this is likely to have marginal educational impact in the developing world. More problematically, it is undermining the potential to build the capacity of developing world education systems because the bulk of the money being spent to produce OERs is being cornered by these developed world actors. Therefore, it is developing capacity and systems there rather than in the developing world. For example, the Hewlett Foundations' recent evaluation report on its OER investments reflects this problem in practice by reporting that only 10% of its investments focused on Africa (all under the line item of 'capacity building'), at least half of which comprised grants provided to developed world institutions. As long as financial resources of this kind are expended predominantly in the developed world, we can expect to make little progress in developing the capacity of developing world education systems to meet the needs of their learners.

Another key issue undermining the transformative potential of OERs is an increasingly heated debate around commercialization of 'free content'. This debate most often finds practical expression in arguments about the Creative Commons licensing framework, and whether or not it is a good idea to impose what is described as a 'non-commercial' restriction within the licence. The reason that this argument has emerged is that, to many people, the concept of creating a non-commercial restriction seems intuitive in order to prevent unfair exploitation of 'free' content. However, as many commentators have eloquently and passionately argued, it turns out that such a restriction can have several unintended consequences in the long term, preventing the 'mixing' of content with different licence conditions and creating unforeseen inflexibilities. These commentators go on to observe that the Share-Alike licensing condition in the Creative Commons licensing framework serves effectively the same purpose as a Non-Commercial restriction by requiring derivative works to be released under identical licensing conditions as the original content on which the derivation was based. They also point out that closing down the possibilities for commercial exploitation of derived works may lead to long term problems in sustainability of the emerging educational commons.

Personally, I am convinced by the argument that releasing OERs under a licence restricting commercial use of the content creates unnecessary restrictions and should be avoided wherever possible. Thus, where I am able to define or advise on the licensing conditions governing OER initiatives, I am inclined to propose that a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence be used (see www.creativecommons.org for more information on what this means). However, I have become bemused by the vehemence of several of the proponents of this position, leading me to reflect on why they hold their positions as strongly as they do.

It seems that many of these proponents are driven by a well-intentioned desire to see content made 'free' (i.e. both costing nothing and freely available for re-use and adaptation without restrictions), mirroring similar debates that have unfolded around Open Source Software. This is a worthwhile cause to a certain extent, but often leads to logical leaps of faith that are not yet sustained by meaningful evidence and that can be educationally problematic. Most notable amongst these is the conviction that making content free to copy, adapt, and exploit commercially in and of itself will lead to better education delivery, particularly in the developing world. Linked to this is another untested assertion that 'free' content equates with good educational content. I too hope that free content will make a contribution to improving education; however, this thesis needs to be proven through demonstration and good practice, not claimed as fact without evidence. Those who claim educational benefit and quality of OERs as fact without providing supporting evidence undermine the credence of their own argument amongst sceptics of the OER movement (and it is notable how the vast majority of writing in this area is based on hypothetical examples, not actual experience of better learning taking place).

Many powerful educational concepts (amongst them, open learning, distance education, and e-learning) have lost their transformative potential because they became associated with wild claims about the educational impact they would have that were not borne out in practice. Protagonists of the concept of OERs and associated removal of 'unnecessary' licensing restrictions that might govern them could usefully seek to prove this potential through demonstration and good practice not rhetoric. More importantly, though, it is critical to acknowledge that making content free is only one aspect of many required to ensure that the quality of education is systematically transformed and improved. This obvious fact is often lost in the debates that have emerged, thus diverting attention away from the critical broader debate about educational transformation that can be catalysed through discussions on OERs.

Linked to this concern is the point, noted even by several proponents of the argument against non-commercial restrictions, that the emerging dogmatism being exhibited by opponents of non-commercial restrictions serves only to alienate those who are taking the first tentative steps towards freeing up restrictive licences governing their educational content. This line of thinking holds that a spectrum of licences is necessary to allow people and organizations choice in deciding how best to begin contributing to the growing pool of available OERs. Pragmatically, this seems to me to make sense. If I am designing a course, and can distribute to learners a specific journal article free of charge, but am not permitted to modify its text, this seems preferable to me than not using it at all if I believe it contains something of value. Likewise, there may also be compelling cases for ensuring that, in certain instances, content that is made available for use should not open for modification, for example journal articles or treatises which report on specific research endeavours or capture a particular perspective in time.

However, a degree of ideological determinism seems to have gripped some members of the OER movement, who argue that any restrictions bar those that their community have defined as 'legitimate' should be resisted. Apart from the obvious pragmatic problems associated with such extreme positions, the additional problem is that they lead to extended, highly technical debates about fine points of detail in increasingly complex licensing regimes. These often confuse and alienate many otherwise powerful allies. Thus, it is not only the dogmatism of the position that alienates many people, but also the banality of the arguments that are being waged. It seems to me to be more logical to create a spectrum of licensing options and then engage constructively to try to persuade those with more conservative approaches to freeing up content about the educational and business merits of less restrictive approaches, rather than rejecting all options bar the 'right' one out of hand.

Given this, the sceptic in me cannot help but wonder why the issue of non-commercial restrictions has become such so charged. It is interesting in this context to note that a growing number of proponents of the argument against non-commercial restrictions work in the field of technology, not education. I have personally watched how 'e-learning' became proselytized by technology carpet-baggers, leading to large-scale wastage of finances on inappropriate technological investments that promised revolutionary change. Massive haemorrhaging of educational finances on poorly conceptualized technology investments continues today, while meaningful systemic examples of technology investments that can be demonstrated to have had a large-scale impact on the quality of learning remain thin on the ground.

Of course, many of the proponents of free content are not selling technologies in this traditional sense, so the obvious commercial rationale would seem not to apply to the 'non- commercial restrictions' debate. However, many of these people are seeking to create large-scale online communities of users whose chief characteristic is that they cost next to nothing to maintain. It is important to realize here that, outside education, new business models are underpinning several technology companies who operate in this way. These companies develop business models by 'monetizing' online communities and the vast quantities of information they generate and exchange, predominantly by delivering these audiences to advertisers. Some have failed, but there have been some spectacular commercial successes, such as YouTube and MySpace. Importantly, almost all - including Google - focused first on building a community and only worried about 'monetizing' it when they had reached a certain critical mass. We should not be so naïve as to believe that similar results are not a possible outcome of OER communities of learners and educators.

I have nothing against this commercialization of Internet audiences, but I believe that educational planners would do well to be highly sceptical of the often excessive educational claims of people building such communities online and the accompanying vehemence with which they argue that these communities can only work if they adhere to specific pre-defined commercial principles. Ultimately and even with the best of intentions, the people building the technological platforms to sustain online OER communities will work to create business models to sustain their technology, not to serve the interests of education (and it is not yet clear that these two interests will always be in alignment, although it is perfectly possible that they may be). While some of the early adherents of these arguments may have the best interests of education at heart, we need to learn from history and remain open to the possibility that - until new financial models for sustaining these educational 'commons' communities are established - a significant risk exists that those communities might be coopted to serve narrow commercial interests at the expense of education. Equally, we should remain ever vigilant of the reality that consumer societies depend on creating consumers, as well as demand for products through advertising, and this is an increasingly powerful commercial force on the Internet. It would be sad indeed to see the massive educational potential of the Internet, its burgeoning wealth of freely available content, and the emerging collaborative tools of web 2.0 platforms erode in the developing world because we bought into a false commercial argument about the importance of ensuring that educational interactions be kept 'open for business' without understanding and defining what type of business we are talking about and how exactly education will benefit. Truly, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Thus, the value of OER projects and initiatives should be measured, in practical terms, against the extent to which they advance the three objectives that I outlined at the outset of this article and the principles of operation that govern OER communities should be driven by this imperative, rather than by dogma. In the developing world, particularly, we should also be highly sceptical of those in the developed world who purport to speak on our behalf, mostly without any meaningful consultation, about the benefits their work will bring us. Education is a social investment, and should be protected as such if it is truly to fulfil its potential in creating a more equal world. This makes it critical to find practical ways to build business models that will ensure the success of the online educational commons. Critically, we would do well to accept that - until this new model is established - it is likely that we will need to retain open minds and a spirit of compromise in engaging the interests of different parties seeking to open access to educational content.

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