They put the curriculum on their website in a variety of open, interoperable formats, as a truly open educational resource, so that schools can download the material to their own servers and students can download it onto their shiny netbooks.

Every open educational resource repository integrates it into their collection. North Carolina realizes that for just a few hundred thousand they can make a version of Virginia’s curriculum that fits their standards, so they do that. MIT gets a $750,000 from NSF to write simulations that go with the VA curriculum. Virginia forms a coalition with North Carolina and other states to fund development of an aligned middle school curriculum. Consultants across the country do a good business selling services around the VA curriculum. Vendors (any and all) sell printed versions, lab kits, sensors and other associated doo-dads. What’s unsustainable about that scenario?

You’re thinking too small.

1) School, government, philanthropy pays someone qualified to write open educational resources in an open, interoperable format.

2) School, government, philanthropy puts open educational resource on their website as a free cultural work.

Once you do that, anyone can use, copy, redistribute, translate, modify, print, sell, or consult about the work. That’s what enables entrepreneurs, not business models around restricting content.

Read Yochai Benkler — The Wealth of Networks, not that middlebrow Wired crap.

“OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”

http://cnx.org/content/m14466/latest/

No, the alternative is that foundations, government and other actors (like Wireless Generation did) pay people to create, improve and distribute free content, which is then distributed widely over the internet through a variety of channels. There is little subsequent cost.

There are plenty of people willing to host, vet, package and distribute freely licensed content and software. There is an entire industry of Linux distributions that do all that with software (e.g., Red Hat, Ubuntu, Suse, etc). There could (and will!) be a similar industry in education eventually, but the NROC strategy blocks that kind of development. It blocks it! And when that part of the industry does start up, it will be excluded by its own design.

Doyle,

OpenOffice.org is not run for the greater good. Sun bought a commercial office suite and made it open source to bootstrap some competition against Microsoft more effectively than they could have done with a commercial alternative. They’re too small a player in that space otherwise.

Most of the work done on OO.org is corporate (by several major corporations) or (non-US) government funded for strategic reasons.

But here’s the thing, to the user, this is all irrelevant. Because OO.org adheres to the standards for free and open source licensing, there is no catch even when the motives are not strictly altruistic. That’s why licensing is so important.

I do not doubt that “the innovations likely to achieve scale and impact will have a business model behind them–” not because only business models are capable of sustaining innovations but rather because monied interests will ultimately squash others.

Prior “free” entrepreneurial gifts in the classroom had hidden costs. Channel One, for example, required that a certain percentage of children watch their programming and their ads. Joel Babbit, the former Channel One President, bragged that “the biggest selling point to advertisers [is]. . . . we are forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials.” Exxon sponsored the Energy Cube, with a biased view against alternative sources.

I take in loco parentis seriously–if the state is going to make schooling compulsory, it had better put in safeguards to protect my children from forces that are not acting in the best interests of my children.

The primary concern of a publicly held company is to increase the bottom line. That’s not my business. The primary function of the public school is to create a functional citizenry, and that is my business.

As far as the “the model we grew up with—25 kids in a classroom reading the same textbook and answering questions at the end of the chapter.” It’s already dead, at least in my district, and my district is not unique.

Your company’s existence is as good an example as any. You may mean well, and I believe that you believe that your heart is in the right place. Still, your purpose is to sell a certain point of view. There’s plenty of time to sell to the children outside of school.

I agree that the web does change education in many marvelous ways, and districts can save a lot of money by taking advantage of open source code. I just hope that superintendents recognize that “free” often comes with hidden costs.