The Course Hero/Lumen Deal
Michael Feldstein,
eLiterate,
Sept 13, 2022
Michael Feldstein offers his take on the transfer of OER courses from Lumen Learning to Course Hero. I'm not sure he adds a lot to what we know, but he does round it up into one neat package. What is notable is the fact that the announcement took many people by surprise, and that the two companies involved didn't realize there would be such a widespread public reaction. Feldstein's take, though, is that "the academic community needs to get far more sophisticated in their thinking about how sustainability works when OER gets used as infrastructure in a for-profit EdTech world." And he asks, "how do we cultivate companies whose business interests benefit from promoting affordable, quality education?" Well, maybe we shouldn't. Lumen Learning, in saying something like "the private sector is the best way to host OERs," created the problem. Why is it up to the academic community to solve it? Maybe we should be thinking of teaching and learning resources primarily as public infrastructure, developed in order to support teachers and students, and not as some tool designed to "cultivate companies".
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