The Crumbling of the OpenEd Coalition –

"The OpenEd coalition has long consisted of (at least) three different groups with three different primary goals:

1. Increase access to education by lowering cost of curricular materials
2. Increase quality of education by increasing quality of curricular materials
3. Promote values of education by fostering autonomy for educators and agency for learners...

Depending on how you interpret and rank these three priorities, your beliefs about strategy and values could be quite different. And there have long been signs that, in fact, there were very serious tensions among the views and priorities of the coalition members.

In 2015, Phil Hill and I gave a joint keynote at the OpenEd conference in Vancouver. The theme of our talk was precisely that OpenEd was a brittle coalition that could fracture if the coalitional challenges were not addressed. Phil, in his part, talked about the challenge and opportunity that faculty surveys about OER demonstrated. There was a lot to be accomplished. My half of the talk was about my experience as a climate activist and how hard it is to build a coalition that holds together and accomplishes its goals over time (hint hint)...."