Of OER and Free Riders

"Heather’s post is reacting to this quote from an article she read recently: “There is one additional requirement for widespread OER adoption. Incentives need to discourage ‘free-riders’.” This statement is demonstrably false. Of the 50 colleges in the US today with widespread OER adoption initiatives underway (by “widespread” here I mean that so many faculty across the institutions are adopting OER that it is – or will soon be – possible for students to earn complete degrees using only OER), literally none of them have discouraging incentives like those Annand describes. I could have ended this post here, but there’s more to say."