Stephen Downes

Personally I don't see the benefit of a "national" open ecosystem when the problems we face are global, and at a global scale I would certainly not support the idea of a single centralized system based in the nation in question. It's also not clear that we need a 'courseware' ecosystem, which tends to favour large centralized learning institutions, though there is a useful expansion of what counts as 'courseware' in the article. But what I did like about the article was the list of goals supported by the "several distinct but interconnected movements" such as open education, open science, etc. The problem, argues Delman Larsen, is that the broader goals need to be "translated into a more tangible objective and mechanism." But different nations have different priorities (ours, for example, isn't to absorb our nearest neighbours) which leads to different mechanisms. Anyhow, Larsen is also asking for input in the CCCOER Google Group, and I recommend people engage with this.

When I worked for the government I proposed on a number of occasions that we provide national technology support services for various educational functions - everything from collaborative authoring platforms to discussion forms to videoconferencing. These proposals never went anywhere (*sigh*) but we see a version of the same sort of thing in this post focusing on the now-necessary topic of digital sovereignty. "I think our conception of digital sovereignty needs to be broader - taking from the European Union's Berlin Declaration focus on everyone: for individuals, businesses and institutions... The B.C. Open Collection demonstrates a Canadian model for curating, adapting and reusing publicly supported open content, while Germany's openCode provides an operational example of public-sector software discovery, reuse and collaborative development."

I'm sympathetic with what Todd Conaway is saying here but don't really have a solution. Basically, the lament is that a community dedicated to the open web has essentially dissolved - it never grew, and the old members drifted off. This used to happen to mailing lists too. The same thing happens to topics of discussion. Something gets hot for a while, communities coalesce, and then the world moves on. I've been through a few of these cycles - learning objects, e-learning 2.0, connectivism, MOOCs, open learning. You can go from being the centre of attention in one minute to last year's news in a minute. Remember blockchain? Covid? These day's it's AI and you can see the ebbs and flows within this domain - models, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), model context protocol (MCP), agents. All of this is hard on the durability of online community. It's hard to have something unique and interesting to share in each of these new topics as they come and go.  It's hard to find that cool change.

Higher Education Strategy Associates and its many advertisers have released this year's State of Postsecondary Education in Canada report (144 page PDF). The main message, right up front, is that "the crisis in Canadian post-secondary finances is showing up everywhere except the data." The complaint about lack of data shows up frequently in the report; Statistics Canada data is not available beyond 2025 and this does not take into account recent developments such as the reduction of international students and demographic shifts (it makes me really wish sources were cited for the many tables and charts). But I wonder whether it's a crisis or a contraction. We also read that "Total postsecondary education institutional income in Canada reached an all-time high of $73.5 billion in 2024-25, an increase of 91% in real terms since 2001-02." Also, "2024-25 saw the highest ever enrolment in public post-secondary education in Canada." There are many little stories in the report (for example,the calculations that propose that "on average, per-student subsidies exceed per-student fees," and there's so much missing - not necessarily for lack of data as lack of focus, for example, use of technology, online-vs-in-person, residential vs commuter, working while learning, etc. 

This isnèt online learning technology per se but rather what online learning has to work against. "The model was relatively simple: The company mass-produced AI-generated content... posted it on one of the Facebook pages they ran and included a hyperlink. That link would take users to one of HTV's many websites, where ads for things like fungus medication, Bank of Montreal or Nova Scotia tourism would be plastered across the articles." Some of the pages have millions of followers and it's obviously a successful business where everybody benefits "except for Canadians, Canadian businesses and Canadian democracy."

"Every instructional designer I know keeps a folder of half-broken spreadsheets built to cope with work that should have been automated a decade ago," writes Curt Zilbersher, "so I'm building them properly and giving them away. After twenty-eight years in this field, this is the part I want to give back." According to the site, these are all "free, single-purpose tools for instructional designers. No account, and your files never upload. Estimators, converters and inspectors for the unglamorous half of the job."